As the moonlight fades, pale patches remain—a killing frost. The woods’ edge is nearly bare of leaves below the brick-red crowns of the oaks.
October 2023
October 29, 2023
Dead stillness giving way to rain at dawn, in the glowing absence of the full moon.
October 28, 2023
In the dawn light, the tulip poplars glow a deep orange. It’s unseasonably warm. A spring peeper calls at the edge of the woods.
October 27, 2023
Dark at sunrise, but only a sprinkle of rain. Up in the woods, a deer rustles through freshly fallen leaves, breakfasting on acorns.
October 26, 2023
Sunrise: pink and orange in the sky as on the hillside. A white-breasted nuthatch punctuates a white-throated sparrow’s song.
October 25, 2023
A dozen geese come honking over the house, interrupting three crows sharing their excitement over a venison gut pile up in the woods.
October 24, 2023
Clear and cold with a heavy inversion layer: sparrow sounds blend with beeping quarry trucks. In the dim light, all the autumn colors look like blood.
October 23, 2023
First frost here and there like someone’s first white hairs. I crunch through it en route to the top of the field to watch the dawn approaching from 50 miles away.
October 22, 2023
After a windy night, the forest is looking decidedly threadbare in its coat of many colors, illuminated each time the sun finds a hole in the clouds.
October 21, 2023
In the half-light, a patter of hooves from just inside the woods. The grunts of a buck in rut. A dawn sky coming through the trees.
October 20, 2023
Between dawn and sunrise, a small rainstorm’s pleasant susurration drowns out everything else. As it eases, a Carolina wren takes over, caroling in a minor key.
October 19, 2023
One degree above freezing and very still. I add my breath to the ground fog rising through yellow leaves into the sunlight.
October 18, 2023
A flat white sky crossed by a crow. Woods’-edge chipmunks in a chipping contest. The color.
October 17, 2023
Gloomy and cold at dawn. From the depths of the seed-laden goldenrod, the first, bright chips and whistles as the sparrow horde wakes up.