juncos

‪Weak sunlight. Dead leaves are all a-rustle, rummaged through by squirrels, voles, chipmunks, juncos. The distant cry of a maybe killdeer.‬

Steady rain; the frost in the windows has turned to fog. Juncos move through the weeds like a human crowd, a mix of the bold and the timid.

The whisper of sleet falling on sleet. A snowbird bursts from under my chair where it must’ve been foraging and joins the rest of the flock.

‪I have to wipe the fog off my chair before I can sit. After a while, it begins to rain. In the dead meadow weeds, a commentary of sparrows.‬

A honeybee investigates my thermos mug, brushing my finger with her wings. The barberry bush trembles from all the sparrows in it.

Warm eddies mingle with the cold. A flock of sparrows moves through the meadow, singing, twittering, setting the goldenrod heads asway.

Between bitter gusts of wind, I hear the calls of juncos and nuthatches, chickadees and titmice, a song sparrow singing in the ditch.

A squirrel enters the cavity in the dead elm and rests its chin on the lip of the hole, watching silently as juncos swirl through the yard.

Cold and clear. The mostly bare branches shine silver in the sun. A junco flies twittering through the porch.

A light smear of sun in the Monday gray. Birds stir in the tall cedar beside the house: the chip chip of a junco; a tree sparrow’s tseet.

Open water in the ditch. Juncos fly down to drink then up to perch in the snow-laden branches of a dogwood, shaking themselves like dogs.

After the coldest night of the year so far, I’m basking in the bright sunlight, listening to the quiet hops of a junco approaching my chair.

A sharp-shinned hawk careens out of the woods, dives for a junco, misses. It lands on a locust limb and ruffles its feathers.

A few small birds are among the sideways-flying snowflakes. From the tops of the pines, two blue jays issue their usual denunciations.