A catbird mimics the wood thrush, call-and-response style, getting the phrasing right but little else. Venus fades into the dawn sky.
Year: 2010
A robber fly rides a wind-blown leaf like a sailor on the deck of a heaving ship, sun catching the life-preserver orange of its thorax.
Just inside the woods, the soft clucks of a hen turkey trailed by a single chick. A thrush song sounds like a threnody—slow, sad notes.
A male yellowthroat flies from perch to perch without singing. It occurs to me that most of the music in my life wasn’t made for human ears.
Coffee mug in one hand, I’m weeding stiltgrass from the herb bed. Such a delicate invader, so easy to kill! And yet so tough to eradicate.
The air is close, but it gets even closer: first a shower, then a torrent. The wood thrush falls silent. The doe flicks water from her ears.
Already by 8:00, the noontime heat is heralded by the aimless dance of a cabbage white butterfly, the dry rattle of a grasshopper’s wings.
A rare alarm call from one of the reclusive Cooper’s hawks nesting up in the woods. Sometimes I feel like a trespasser in my own front yard.
Sun on the windows—my hand casts two shadows on the page. The monotonous call of a titmouse gets a faint, equally monotonous reply.
Steady rain. A phoebe snatches insects from the undersides of birch leaves, and in the distant drone of an airplane I hear news of the sun.
I watch the sunbeams’ slow drift of mites and motes, entranced, until a shadow cackles: pileated woodpecker resplendent in his tribal crest.
Cardinal song on a cool morning—those January notes. Up in the woods, a patch of sun on rain-slick huckleberry leaves shines white as snow.
A bald-faced hornet lands on a dead cherry limb, chews and fills her mandibles with wood. Somewhere another tree is growing a paper fruit.
Overcast and damp. A heron flies over, and my gaze slides from its slow, calm wingbeats to the ceaseless agitation of the quaking aspens.