A brown thrasher’s jazz echoes off the barn. In the clear plastic hummingbird feeder, a lampyrid beetle takes a very long time to drown.
Month: May 2020
Pileated woodpecker threading the trees: black and white wings slow as an old film flicker behind the pink and green pixels of new leaves.
An earth-shaking blast from the quarry, preceded by a muffled boom as if by its own echo. I catch a glimpse of a hummingbird’s long tongue.
Through the warm sun and the cold wind, hummingbirds come and go. I squint at the trees, trying to tell if the leaves are any bigger today.
Sun one minute, rain the next. The plastic flamingo bobbing in the wind keeps her eye on the weeds: cleavers, soapwort, cypress spurge.
Sunny and warmer. The hummingbirds have survived yesterday’s freeze, and their tiny motors roar as they chase and do courtship displays.
Still below freezing by late morning. Snowflakes wander back and forth among the new leaves. Holes in the clouds open and close.
Cold rain getting harder. The Carolina wren’s “tea kettle” call never seemed more appropriate. The catbird lisps and buzzes like a warbler.
The tulip tree’s luminous new leaves flutter against the blue sky in such a way that one can almost see why foresters call it a poplar.
Rain. A gray catbird on the gray road pecking at things that are not gray. In the trees above, a blue-headed vireo sings possession.
The sun goes in and it’s cold. But a hummingbird still comes to the flying saucer-shaped feeder, in which rock the bodies of drowned ants.
Two catbirds are carrying dead grass into a barberry bush. A grackle emerges from a hole in the yard with his yellow thief’s eye.
Sunny and almost warm. A male hummingbird comes in to the feeder, after first examining the empty hook where another feeder hung last year.
Out too late to hear the wood thrush, I’m stuck with a catbird’s Muzak version. The bridal wreath’s skinny bloom-fingers shake in the wind.