A cold wind rummaging through the forest, mixing up the sounds of crows and trains and sirens. The sun appears for a second or two at a time.
April 2025
April 15, 2025
Two towhees tweet as I drink my tea. Finally they meet at the woods’ edge, tails flared, and one flees. Blue holes appear in the clouds.
April 14, 2025
Against the gray sky, one small dash of yellow at the woods’ edge: a male goldfinch. Nearby, the slow chant of a blue-headed vireo.
April 13, 2025
It’s still cool and overcast, but the daffodils have straightened up and bright spots are appearing in the clouds. A hen turkey walks past, head down, selecting small stones for her gizzard.
April 12, 2025
Cold and heavily overcast. A gray squirrel emerges from the woods like a ghost, seeming to float over the rain-darkened leaf duff, fur the color of the sky.
April 11, 2025
It may be cold, damp, and cloudy, but budburst has come to the old lilac, once again stippled in bright green despite having to re-leaf after last summer’s drought.
April 10, 2025
Sunrise somewhere between showers, cold and sodden, the sky flat-white like the eye of a dead fish. No flies for the flycatchers, no sun for the wren.
April 9, 2025
Below freezing still, and the sky more clear than not. Up on the ridge, a hermit thrush is singing: faint chimes, as if some gate to paradise had a doorbell.
April 8, 2025
A patchwork sky at sunrise with a bitter wind. The daffodils’ cups are all overturned. A few lost snowflakes straggle past.
April 7, 2025
Cold rain with an occasional rattle of ice pellets. The creek has risen from a gurgle to a gush. The cardinal sings from deep within the juniper.
April 6, 2025
Damp gloom suffused with white-throated sparrow song, high and thin and tremulous, amid bright splashes of yellow: daffodils, forsythia, spicebush.
April 5, 2025
Overcast and quiet, after the drama of a thunderstorm at dawn. The creekside currant bushes have turned intensely green. A hen turkey’s peevish rasp.
April 4, 2025
A damp and gloomy sunrise. Juncos twitter in the tops of black birches. A cowbird’s liquid note.
April 3, 2025
Hard rain slackening after sunrise. As the drumming on the roofs subsides, I can hear a torrent of Carolina wren song and towhee calls.