Sunny and warm. Behind the screen of green leaves, a vulture’s lazy drift. A hummingbird collides with a carpenter bee over the yard.
Year: 2020
A field sparrow fresh from bathing and a hummingbird fresh from fighting sit two feet apart on a walnut branch, shaking their feathers.
Late morning soundscape: scarlet tanager, towhee, great-crested flycatcher, catbird, red-eyed vireo, crow, the neighbour kids.
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.
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.