The opening day of rifle season. Deer run back and forth through the laurel—each shift of the wind must bring a different human’s stink.
November 2009
11/29/2009
Soft-focus shadows from the high, thin clouds. Chickadees are calling chirree-chirrup, a car door slams, a crow goes yelling into the sun.
11/28/2009
The female cardinal—a being guaranteed to unsettle conservative Catholics—answers her mate’s anxious chirps, crest bent back by the wind.
11/27/2009
A tulip poplar key helicopters past the porch, shook loose by a squirrel at the edge of the woods rummaging among the spikey cups of seeds.
11/26/2009
As if giving thanks, the thin, wavering call of a white-throated sparrow. The dawn sky half-cloud, half-clear. A distant owl.
11/25/2009
Damp and overcast, but every bird on the mountain seems to be passing through my yard, wings flashing like old coins, like wooden nickels.
11/24/2009
Rain and fog with raven: silent, just above the treetops. White-throated sparrows and a freight train whistling at the same pitch.
11/23/2009
Gray morning with raven: that gutteral, wild cry so inadequately rendered in birders’ onomatopoeia as Bonk, bonk.
11/22/2009
The still, gray morning is interrupted by the stuttering roar of a pickup full of hunters hauling an enormous homemade wooden tree stand.
11/21/2009
A half-grown barn cat crawls out from under the house, gray and bedraggled as a clump of drier lint. One jay rasping at the top of a locust.
11/20/2009
Cold and quiet, except for the sound of incisors chiseling a bone-hard walnut and the wind hissing through scattered marcescent leaves.
11/19/2009
Drizzle turns into downpour and the fog retreats up the ridge. An hour later the rain eases and the fog rolls in again, erasing the trees.
11/18/2009
A red-bellied woodpecker’s head going up and down at the top of a tall locust, squeaking like a red marker on the whiteboard sky.
11/17/2009
A doe flees the urgent attentions of the resident 6-point, his burp-like grunts. Overhead, the loud cry of a crow chasing a hawk by itself.