The first clear sky in days. In the deep, holiday silence, each bird call sounds distinct, as if it comes from a far-off time or place.
Month: May 2021
Rainy and cold. An indigo bunting and a phoebe clash briefly in the air above the stream and retire to neighboring walnut branches.
Mid-morning, and the rain has dwindled into cold mizzle. In the marsh at the bottom of the meadow, the spring peepers start back up.
Dawn stealing influence from the just-past-full moon. The whip-poor-will awakening the catbird.
It’s so clear I can see the tiniest specks of aerial flotsam drifting past the sun. A cuckoo switches to his most plaintive call.
A mid-air tangle between a phoebe and a wood pewee ends with the latter calling once from a walnut branch and flying back into the woods.
Brightening sky. I watch a chipmunk on the wall beside the porch making her “chuck” call, so loud—using the stone as a resonator.
Waiting for rain, everything sounds like an augury—catbird, chipmunk, great-crested flycatcher—and just before the first drops, that hush.
The dame’s-rocket is at its height; my overgrown front yard is the equal of any garden. The catbird seems to concur.
The black cherry blossoms are already fading, and the sun is going from dandelion-yellow to dandelion seedhead-white. Black-billed cuckoo.
Cool morning. The melancholy sweetness of a wood thrush song. At the woods’ edge, the small black cherry has gone to bloom.
Mid-morning and it’s already hot. The black locusts—last to leaf out—have a fresh green fuzz. A carpenter bee inspects the roof.
A nocturnal visitor has dug up four of my herbs, tunneling into the compost. Below the porch, a least flycatcher, handsome in his eye rings.
Even on a morning this incomparable I can be squinting at my phone and nearly miss the sun on a hummingbird’s back.