The old cherry stump beside the porch has once again attracted a pair of nest-minded chickadees. They pop in and out of its many holes.
4/24/2017
Overcast and cool. I’m outside for an hour and there’s no point at which something—chipmunk, squirrel, towhee, siren—isn’t signalling alarm.
4/23/2017
I sit with my feet propped on the top railing as usual. A chickadee with a beak full of grass lands on my boots and hops from toe to toe.
4/22/2017
The black birch catkins are even longer and yellower than yesterday, shining in the rain. The shadbush have traded blossoms for pale leaves.
4/21/2017
A red-tailed hawk flies just inside the woods’ edge, past the birches with their catkins and the rambling old lilac just coming into bloom.
4/20/2017
The rhyming couplets of a brown thrasher. A blue-headed vireo’s dreamy soliloquy. When the sun comes out, raindrops glisten on every twig.
4/19/2017
Something sets off the neighbor’s rooster, and a few moments later a raven flies past the porch, croaking like a duck with laryngitis.
4/18/2017
The tulip tree’s leaves have burst their buds—a pale green cloud. A gnatcatcher in the shadbush darts and hovers like a slow hummingbird.
4/17/2017
I can’t see the pear tree behind the house, but from time to time a few petals flutter down among the cabbage white butterflies in the yard.
4/16/2017
Against dark clouds, the white blossoms of shadbush massed at the woods’ edge. A vole breaks cover in the yard: a gray streak.
4/15/2017
The buzzing dog-fights of carpenter bees competing for access to the porch’s old wood. The first tiger swallowtail flutters into the yard.
4/14/2017
Sunny and cool. Two crows drive a third out of the pines with a low-in-the-throat noise that would sound threatening in any language.
4/13/2017
High in the lilac, a squirrel wedges a freshly dug-up walnut between three branches, descends, climbs back, retrieves it and carries it off.
4/12/2017
A red-bellied woodpecker’s flight like a fast oarsman, far-apart wingbeats propelling it through the blue. It disappears into a tall locust.