Crystal-clear and quiet as the sun goes from gold to yellow and leaves its nest of leaves. The waxy chatter of goldfinches gives way to the wheeze of a black-and-white warbler.
American goldfinch
Clear and cold. The bird app identifies singers I cannot hear: ruby-crowned kinglet, American goldfinch, Canada goose. Ten minutes later, I do hear another lone goose go over, a slight note of panic in its honks.
Freezing mist—enough for drip-line percussion from the roof. The waxy chatter of finches up at my mother’s feeders. Down in the hollow, the thunder of a pileated woodpecker.
Rain starts at sunrise and tapers off a half hour later. In its wake: phoebe, pewee, goldfinch, Carolina wren. A cedar waxwing’s whistle.
Clear and still at sunrise, with a sheen of dew on the meadow. A screech owl trills in the distance, nearly drowned out by goldfinches.
Cool as an autumn morning, with twittering goldfinches in lieu of yellow leaves. Just inside the woods’ edge, two deer chase back and forth, pausing for breath six feet apart.
White sun in a white sky crossed by crows. Twittering goldfinches have the mid-morning chorus mostly to themselves, aside from one dogged towhee.
Out at dawn for the cardinal’s opening salvo and a mosquito nuzzling my neck. The twittering of goldfinches. An east-bound freight blows its horn.
Day three of the heat wave. The cicadas have been calling since before dawn. Two goldfinches yellower than the sun come chittering out of the treetops and swoop past the porch.
Cool and mostly clear at sunrise. A goldfinch chirping in pentameter. The cerulean warbler changes trees—a blue-striped blur.
A lurid sun glimmers through high-altitude haze. Somewhere in the deep grass a hen turkey calls to her poults, as goldfinches party it up in the treetops.
A few clouds at sunrise. Goldfinches chatter over the rap battles of ovenbirds and vireos. Bracken leaves are still opening in the yard—feathers on feathers.
From sun to gloom to sun again in less than an hour. The vireos, ovenbirds, goldfinches and gnatcatchers chatter on regardless, interrupted only by a great crested flycatcher’s stentorian call.
The sun is at half-power, shining through cirrus clouds, the still-bare branches of oaks and black birches, and the trill of a goldfinch, which shows no sign of stopping anytime soon.