Breezy with sometime sunshine. A hummingbird’s buzz grows louder as she hovers in front of a window, bill to bill with an unexpected rival.
Year: 2021
Rain and warblers. An earth-shaking blast from the quarry two miles away. The soft susurrus of tree crickets.
Sunrise hidden by clouds. Towhee and cardinal’s usual soliloquies. A mosquito sings her need into my ear.
Cloudy with 100% chance of migrating warblers: the yard is briefly possessed. I hear a noise, turn my head and meet a rabbit’s critical gaze.
Ten minutes before first light, the first distant, barking dog. Ten minutes before that, a barred owl’s cackle.
Cloudy and cool. A hummingbird buzzes in, and I wonder if she’s the same one I saw in the woods yesterday sitting on a branch, almost still.
First light. A meteor slices through Orion below the belt, and I flinch like a spectator at a pro wrestling match.
Dawn. A bat zig-zags high over the meadow en route to its roost as the few clouds turn pink.
It’s still cool, but the air smells like heat. I watch a sulphur butterfly’s erratic flight path. Does even it know its next move?
Tulip poplar leaves waving like four-fingered, cartoon hands. A shimmer of mizzle thickens into rain. The Carolina wrens go on dueting.
Sunny and humid. The electric whine of annual cicadas ebbs and flows. A hummingbird flies into the forest’s wall of leaves at top speed.
Walnut leaves have begun to yellow, as leaf miners turn the locust trees brown. A red-eyed vireo warbles on and on.
Cool and humid. An Acadian flycatcher gathers breakfast from the leaves of a walnut sapling. Sleep still tugs at my eyelids.
Bright sun. A goldfinch lands on a spent bergamot head and extracts some seeds. Two hummingbirds battle over my four, scraggly beebalms.