Black-throated green warbler. I fetch my chair from the creek where the storm blew it. High over the neighboring valley, a killdeer’s cry.
Year: 2018
Cloudy and cool. The great-crested flycatchers are back with their dinosaur calls. From down-hollow, the faint carillon of a wood thrush.
Three days of heat have fuzzed the treetops in gray-green gauze. A warbler wheezes. The breeze makes an empty beer bottle moan.
A squirrel emerges beside the one white miniature daffodil, just coming into bloom as the others shrivel. A Baltimore oriole’s glossy song.
It’s hot. Everything with a stinger is out and about. Two carpenter bees body-slam like professional wrestlers and fall down to the floor.
Bright sun, cloudless sky. A ways off through the woods, the sudden swoop of a hawk, shining feathers melting back into shining twigs.
Below freezing. A few snowflakes swirl past. Inside, the resident mouse dashes from errand to errand, unaware that this is a day of rest.
Sun warms the porch; a rising buzz of flies. Each spicebush around the farm is yellowing up on its own schedule, bud to fuzz to frowze.
The rain peters out, and the daffodils stop bobbing to its beat like headbangers. A gnatcatcher resumes its sallies from the lilac bush.
A blue wound opens in the clouds and heals over again. In the garden, pink claws that may become peonies if a late frost doesn’t kill them.
The birds seem unusually active; there must be a fresh bloom of aerial plankton. Even the brown thrasher brings his jazz to the yard.
Kinglets drop down out of the trees to join the gnatcatchers hawking insects in the yard. They sing, feint, flash eponymous ruby crowns.
Two blue-gray gnatcatchers take turns sallying forth from the lilac, zigzagging, hovering to hoover their namesake prey from the cool air.
Cloudless and still. A pair of flickers inspect the old flicker den in the dead elm where a rat snake once swallowed all the hatchlings.