Wednesday December 02, 2009

Dave Bonta December 2, 2009

Cold, gray morning. I inventory the remaining spots of green: moss, grass, mountain laurel, pine, a rosette of thistle outlined in frost.

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From up in the woods, the kak-kak-kak call of a Cooper's hawk. The first question mark butterfly lands among dead leaves and vanishes. …

Sunny and warm. Meltwater drips furiously onto the broken bones of icicles. The deep blue sky of late morning is all but empty of jets. …

New snow blown about by a bitter wind. A red-tailed hawk struggles to gain altitude, mocked by a blue jay doing its best hawk scream. …

Bright and windy. Leaves skitter like crabs across the forest floor. I track an unseen hawk's passage by the squirrel alarms it sets off. …

Strong sun; vociferous crows. It's astonishing how many strands of spider web and caterpillar silk still shimmer in the trees. …

Yesterday's melting has turned old footprints from pits into little hills. New tracks are muddy brown, fading out by the middle of the yard. …

The resident naturalist emerges from the woods, white slacks and dark blue coat a perfect camouflage against the new snow and blue shadows. …

Sunny and warm. A squirrel crossing the old corral with a disinterred walnut in its mouth follows the shadow of an oak tree into the woods. …

Yesterday's insects have been replaced again by wandering snowflakes. A vulture flaps to gain altitude, its head red and garish as a wound. …

Cold and gray. The groundhogs are snarling under the house. A squirrel disinters its breakfast and cleans off the dirt with its teeth. …

Tundra swans at sunrise—their ethereal flutes, their shining white forms—are trailed by a local Canada goose and the crescent moon. …

A rapid whistling of wings: a woodcock hurtles through the yard at eye-level. Thank you, Congress, for giving back our slow, dark mornings. …

Winter's back! My white plastic stack chair lies upside-down at the end of the porch. The snowpack has gone from quicksand back to granite. …

The Morning Porch