Daily short takes from an Appalachian hollow
Overcast and cool. When I tire of feeding myself to the mosquitoes, I don a bug hat and go into the yard with my phone to identify whatever has been skeletonizing trees and shrubs: angle-lined prominent moth caterpillars on the bigtooth aspen, pinstriped in green but too hairy to be extra twigs, and dogwood sawfly larvae on the silky dogwoods, curled into fat white moons.
Daybreak comes in a lull between storms. An orange leaf spirals down at the woods’ edge as thunder rumbles off to the east, and now again in the west. A green stink bug crawls under the arm of my green chair.
Everything drips from rain in the wee hours. I notice that the white lilac at the woods’ edge is blooming again, and more vigorously then it did in the spring, before months of assault from whatever disease has been decimating its leaves. There’s an almost ghostly presence to these new white inflorescences, appearing alongside a flush of fresh green.
Humid, overcast and warm. Half-way between the crickets in the grass and the cicadas in the treetops, the Carolina wren’s teakettle teakettle teakettle lets off steam.
At least half the leaves on the walnut trees in my yard have turned yellow now, still glistening from a shower at dawn. The red-eyed vireo who was calling then is still going strong three hours later.
Overcast and cool. A sudden thumping under the floor, and a small groundhog goes running out into the garden, followed by the head of a larger groundhog, who turns to look at me over the end of the porch. After a minute-long staring contest, she drops out of sight.
Moonlit dawn. A screech owl quavers, prompting a barred owl to hoot. As light builds in the east, a whippoorwill begins to shriek.
Sun in the treetops. A doe emerges from the woods to browse the road bank, followed by her two grown fawns already in their unspotted, gray-brown winter coats. Head up, her ears swivel toward a distant crow.
Soft sunlight and the scent of autumn leaf-mould. Two female hummingbirds visit the jewelweed together and leave together, but seem quite competitive around the flowers: a mother trying to distance herself from a fledged offspring, I suppose.
Cloudless and cool. The cicadas start up before it even reaches 60 degrees Fahrenheit. Sunlight pools at the entrance to the trail into the woods. Half the bracken fronds in the yard have turned bronze.
An autumnal morning, heavily overcast and cool. The continuous trill of tree crickets counterbalances the stream’s trickle: two kinds of traffic. A pileated woodpecker cackles.
An hour before sunrise, the clouds part to reveal the Pleiades above the ridge, as well as the V-shape that ancient Babylonians saw as a bull’s head—clearly a cosmic rat. A distant whine of tires as the first commuters take to the road.
Again I am the object of a hummingbird’s intense study from three feet away, this time for nearly a minute. Then she’s off to the back of the house and the banks of orange jewelweed there.
Cool and mostly clear. A raven croaks loudly from the vicinty of the powerline, just after the bird app tells me American Crow is my Bird of the Day. The smell of woodsmoke. A dog-day cicada starts up.