Drizzle at sunrise. Rain-slick tree trunks shine in their green sleeves of lichen. The sky shows signs of breaking up.
November 21, 2025
Thick fog. A screech owl trills, seemingly in answer to the wren. Then crows join the chat. The owl’s trilling pauses, then resumes a quarter mile away.
November 20, 2025
Freezing fog that lifts after sunrise into a gray woolen sky, leaving frosted branches for the squirrels—gray or red, cautious or pell-mell.
November 19, 2025
An inch of wet snow, glowing like a second sky on every branch and twig. I catch a rare whiff of sewage from the treatment plant three miles away.
November 18, 2025
Cold and still. A sky etched with faintly pink contrails. The song sparrows sing in fragments, while the white-throated sparrows merely chirp.
November 17, 2025
Partly clear and windy at sunrise. A sharp-shinned hawk comes in low over the houses, immediately attracts the attention of crows, and flees back north with three in hot pursuit.
November 16, 2025
Wind and clouds and the clattering of treetops rocking out of sync. Two squirrels hunting the last unfallen acorns keep climbing into the top branches of a big red oak, hanging by their hind legs to peel their prizes.
November 15, 2025
A raven with something red in its beak. Three running deer causing a fourth to raise and lower her tail. Patches of gold appear among the clouds.
November 14, 2025
Frosty and still at dawn. A hunter’s flashlight ascends a ridgetop tree and goes out, subsumed by the crescent moon’s open parenthesis.
November 13, 2025
Cold and mostly clear. An occasional sound of trains or traffic rises above the shush of wind. A single red cloud scuds overhead and disappears off east.
November 12, 2025
Cold and gray, with the wind hissing through the last few oak leaves still on the trees. The male Carolina wren sleeps in past his mate, her ‘response’ preceding his call by nearly five minutes.
November 11, 2025
A bitter wind has brought the first, thin snowfall. I open my folding seat cushion and find a yellow leaf nestled like a letter in an envelope.
November 10, 2025
Fine flakes falling from a mottled gray sky. At the bottom of the hollow, two trains whistle the crossing at once, one high, one low.
November 9, 2025
Thick fog. When the wren stops singing, there’s dead silence for several minutes until a nuthatch calls. From father away, the death-cry of a rabbit.