Sun through thin clouds—a milky light. A phoebe is making the rounds, chanting his call at every past nesting spot: barn, shed, garage…
Year: 2022
Sunrise reddens the western ridge and its whine of traffic. Cardinal song. With my last sip of tea, the sun strikes my face.
10F/-12C but the wind has mostly died. The plastic flamingo leans only slightly askew in the snowy garden. Patches of blue converge overhead.
Snow falling fast in silence. A song sparrow pipes up with what generations of birders have heard as “Hip hip hurrah, boys, spring is here!”
Clear everywhere except where the sun rises pink, orange and yellow, heralded by small woodpeckers with loud, locust-wood drums.
Yesterday’s snow glitters between the shadows of trees. To the winter-long harangues of cardinal, titmouse and Carolina wren, add one phoebe.
Snow. I’m just in time to watch the ground disappear. The woods’ edge slowly reverts to winter calligraphy: broad brushstrokes of white ink.
Back to more typical March weather, gloomy and cold. The stream gurgles low, the wren gurgles high, and two crows wing their way in silence to a breakfast of bones.
Cloudy and warm. A Coopers’s hawk darts through the treetops. From the barnyard, a phoebe’s enthusiastic chant. Raindrops.
Robin singing in the rain. It could be April but for the lingering patches of snow and the lack of a blush on the red maples.
A leaden sky at sunrise, but an hour later, the sun glimmers through thinning clouds. Cardinal and titmouse song. The smell of bare dirt.
Sunrise. Trees popping in the cold (11F/-11C). A chickadee adds a rare, third note to his spring song.
A faint dusting of snow on a ground otherwise mostly brown again. It’s just below freezing. The sun makes a dramatic entrance from beneath a curtain of cloud.
The far-off fluting of tundra swans. I scan the sky for them—no luck. I resume reading about horrors on my phone.