Cool and clear as a morning in October. A catbird fresh from his bath picks insects off dogwood leaves with a fussy chirp between each morsel.
May 2022
5/16/2022
Fog buzzing and thrumming with bird calls, filling in where half-sized leaves are still working toward the hegemony of green: pea soup indeed.
5/15/2022
A Louisiana waterthrush declaims from a walnut tree, bobbing up and down as is its wont. Up in the woods, a chipmunk ticks like a too-fast clock.
5/14/2022
The rain stops and the thrush singing at the woods’ edge is joined by warblers, flycatchers, pewee, thrasher, a hummingbird’s mad courtship flight…
5/13/2022
Cloudy with a 100% chance of warblers. A wood thrush gets a drink from the stream and resumes singing. The smell of lilacs.
5/11/2022
Another impeccably clear morning with tree leaves looking as if they grew overnight. A hen turkey cluck-cluck-clucks into the woods.
5/9/2022
Sunrise. A squirrel carries a freshly dug-up walnut in its mouth. The tulip tree’s leaves are already big enough to wave like a rave of one.
5/8/2022
A wet and shining woods stippled with burst buds. Over the rush of the creek, a cerulean warbler’s buzzy love song to the sky.
5/7/2022
After 24 hours of rain, water streams from the mountain’s every pore. The daffodils’ last trumpet points toward the forest.
5/6/2022
White lilac blooming in the rain. A hummingbird buzzes my propped-up boots, his crimson gorget the brightest thing in the hollow.
5/5/2022
Clear and cool. A blue-winged warbler forages in the crown of the almost-flowering crabapple, his song like the wheeze of an ancient bellows.
5/4/2022
A break in the rain. A vole dashes back and forth in the yard. Through the foggy woods, the pale wings of a hawk hunting for breakfast.
5/3/2022
Overcast with a soundscape ranging from the sublime to the ridiculous: hermit thrush, tom turkey, a gnat mistaking my ear for a flower.
5/2/2022
Sun through thinning fog—prismatic beads of water twinkling from every twig like the souls of dead leaves. It feels almost masochistic to turn my eyes to my book.