Daily short takes from an Appalachian hollow
Heavily overcast skies prolong the lingering darkness till well past sunrise, but eventually the duetting screech owls and the all-night migrants softly calling from the woods’ edge fall silent, the crows disperse, and the wren, one imagines, must be off busying himself with matters of great import.
Sunny and still at mid-morning, with backlit leaves at the woods’ edge looking even yellower than they are. The throb of a distant engine. Squirrel teeth chiseling open a walnut. A common yellowthroat pipes up.
Overcast and still. A gray squirrel stashes a husked walnut five feet off the ground in the crotch of a lilac stem—the first I’ve actually seen one do this, though I’ve noticed walnuts stashed in shrubs and assumed it was the work of squirrels. Or perhaps just this particular squirrel, unconvinced of the need for burial.
Overcast and still. The bracken in the yard has all turned brown and the stillgrass is reddening, revealing the dark green leaves of a new volunteer spicebush.
Breezy and cool, with occasional outbreaks of sunshine. It takes me two hours to work out that the soft clucking sound I’d thought was a hen turkey is actually a branch rubbing against the gutter for the back roof. A chipmunk rummages under my chair, then scuttles back under the small woodpile next to me.
Cool and mostly clear, with a wind that keeps the shadows in motion—and the blue jays, too. Each hard gust brings another few acorns rattling down, and the driveway is filling in with walnuts.
Clear and cold. The high-pitched kik-kik-kik of a sharp-shinned hawk elicits a chirr from a red squirrel and a furous denunciation from a crow at the compost pit.
Clear and cold, with an inversion layer bringing quarry and highway sounds out of the east. A female Carolina wren ticks quietly from the thick shrubbery around the springhouse. Cold as I am, I luxuriate in the absense of mosquitoes.
Breezy and cold, with the last few clouds moving off by 9:00: a morning for blue jays and the random marimba-sound of acorns dropping onto rocks and logs.
Drizzle thinning into wind-blown mist by mid-morning. The sky brightens. A pileated woodpecker clings to a skinny locust tree as it sways in the breeze, taps a few times and then tilts her head to the side as if listening for a response.
A gloomy morning, except for the wren: the dull mechanical songs of the quarry, the low cloud ceiling, the cold breath of autumn making leaves tremble on their stems.
Off and on rain and the sporadic crashes of falling walnuts. I watch a yellow tulip tree leaf tumbling down, end over end, the air slipping through its four Mickey Mouse fingers.
Overcast and quiet. A few drops of rain patter in the grass and dead bracken. The enthusiasm of a Carolina wren up by the garage seems wholly unwarranted.
Overcast and cool. A pileated woodpecker flies into the dead top of the tallest black locust in the yard, seemingly oblivious to a swirling conflict between a small flock of local jays and two migrant sharp-shinned hawks. A slow inspection of the treetop turns up nothing worth tapping for, and she flies off, leaving the tree to the jays.