Overcast and cold at first light. The six-point buck is back, stalking through the yard, giving me a long stare as I raise a mug to my lips, but not showing much alarm. The few oaks retaining leaves whisper in the wind.
A classic November morning: cold, gray and blustery, but seasoned with sparrow song. The lilac’s last few green leaves flutter like loose flyers for some long-gone circus.
Clouds in the east briefly matching the rust-red of the threadbare oaks. The muffled drone of NPR voices from my mother’s house. As finch twittering gives way to woodpecker drums, a brisk wind springs up.
Cool and damp. The forsythia at the woods’ edge is yellow again, though this time not from blossoming. Bluebirds and blue jays are calling at the same time, an irrepressible burbling under the jeers.
The old saw “Rain before seven, clear by eleven” might describe this morning, if the holes in the clouds ever stop closing again. It’s humid. The oaks still hold at least half of their leaves, but nearly everything else is down.
A small buck stalks past, his six-point rack held high, minutes before the sun tops the ridge. I can see some cold-weather gnats at the woods’ edge pogoing in the sunbeam. A bluebird up by the barn calls and calls.
Cloudy in the east at sunrise, as the moon’s sideways smile fades overhead. The plaintive piping of white-throated sparrows is interrupted by a song sparrow’s cheery warble.
Sun rising through an increasingly threadbare forest canopy of mellow reds and yellows, all converging on brown: oaks in November. A hunter walks out of the woods in camouflage gray.
Time-change day. It’s cold and very still. A lone goose flies past the half moon, honking.
Contrails thicken into clouds between dwindling patches of pastel blue, but there’s still enough sun to set the crown of the big scarlet oak aglow. A few distant cries of geese off to the north are submerged in Carolina wren song.
Windy and warm for late October. Cumulous clouds accumulate. Tulip-tree samaras comes spinning into the yard like a drone swarm, but one that seeds life rather than death. The kak-kak-kak of a Cooper’s hawk.
Clouds sinking into the trees at daybreak. A thin, high jumble of notes from a brown creeper. It feels and even sounds like rain, but that’s just the dry tick of leaves falling into leaves.
Sun glowing through thin clouds—not just whiter, brighter, as a bygone ad for laundry soap once put it. The nasal call of a nuthatch. A slight breath of wind and a black birch at the woods’ edge divests itself of another hundred leaves.
Neither as cold nor as clear as recent mornings, with the sun thinly veiled by atmospheric murk. The golden-leaved tulip tree in the yard looks duller now than it did in the full moonlight at 4:00 a.m.