Clear and still, with a heavy frost. Wild turkeys call and gobble up above the barn, where a blood-red sunrise seeps down into the meadow.
A cold wind and enough clouds to keep frost at bay, though I doubt the tender young leaves and blossoms will be so lucky tonight. A winter wren burbles by the springhouse. High on the trunk of the big tulip tree, the white breast of a brown creeper inches skyward.
Downy, hairy, red-bellied and pileated: all the woodpeckers for miles around are suddenly drumming, one after another, as the scattered clouds turn orange on a crisp, nearly frosty morning.
A rainy Easter morning. At 6:31 a.m., in the half-light of dawn, a brown thrasher announces his return from the tropics with a minute-long improvisation atop the springhouse roof.
An April shower turns into a downpour just as I come out onto the porch. I look up from my book sometime later and realize that it’s stopped. The sky brightens. A towhee and a song sparrow trade riffs.
Thick fog at dawn, full of robin song and phoebe calls. Sunrise is signalled by little more than the growing thunder of pileated woodpeckers.
Foggy and cool. The distant lowing of a cow. In the currant bushes straddling the stream, a house finch burbles.
Warmish and overcast at mid-morning, with a smudge for the sun. One calling phoebe sets all the others off, until the hollow is ringing with their chants.
The forsythia is fully in bloom, inconguous yellow against the brown woods—not unlike this apparition of a sun burning a hole through the gray clouds. Kinglets flit through the birches. The mourning dove falls silent.
Under gray skies, the old lilac is once again beginning to green up. The zig-zag flight of a phoebe gleaning breakfast out of thin air.
The sun rises behind the clouds, with the temperature right at freezing. Half of the daffodils lie face-down, the other half hold their heads high. Half the sky turns blue.
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.
After night-long rain, a gray almost-radiance. The black birches are looking sharp in their gray-green lichens. The creek is high and making little sense.
Sun finds the spokes of miniature daffodils opening beside the disease-ravaged lilac. I pull my hat-brim down to watch all the early insects already plying the cold spring air.