Daily short takes from an Appalachian hollow
Sunrise brings birdsong: a Tennesee warbler’s blur of high notes answered by a towhee’s interrogatory tweet, and a white-throated sparrow’s “Oh, sweet Canada” giving way to the reedy whistles of cedar waxwings, tut-tutting robins, and a winter wren’s liquid braid.
A sunrise muted by cirrus. Dew dripping from the roof. The undeniable brownness of leaves that had been bright as holiday cards: death has taken that holiday, it seems.
Mist dissipating into blue. The walnut trees on the north side of the house are now nearly bare, even as the one on the south side is still more green than yellow. The sun briefly blazes through a new hole in the hillside canopy.
Overcast but not gloomy. Above the usual yammering of a red-bellied woodpecker, I catch a few phrases of warbler buzz: cerulean, I think.
Cloudy at sunrise, the sky takes its time clearing off. A walnut splats down on the driveway, trailed by a fluttery entourage of yellow leaves.
Steady rain. An hour past daybreak, it begins to get dark again. The rain comes down harder. A cardinal chirps.
Rain in widely scattered drops, a light seasoning over everything. It intensifies; a half-molted walnut tree begins leafleting the yard. It tapers off. A squirrel chisels open a nut.
Damp, overcast and quiet. The sprawling old white lilac battling a blight is once again flowering, with a dozen half-sized clusters at the ends of ravaged limbs looking less like white flags than signal fires: a fight to the death.
The first rain in weeks begins tapping on the roof at dawn. Then it’s here in a rush, the bone-dry leaf duff rattling into a roar.
Heavily overcast: a rain sky with no rain. Up in the woods, a Cooper’s hawk begins to chirp, answered seconds later by a red-tailed hawk. The two hawks exchange calls for several minutes before falling silent and letting the jays take over.
Cloudy and cool. The shed skin of a rat snake has blown off the back roof and dangles in the branches of a walnut. In the next tree over, a gray squirrel walks to the end of a limb, sniffing each walnut, and picks the one at the very end.
Sun through thin cirrus. Half an hour of a hawk hunting the yellow woods and I have yet to catch a glimpse, tracking its movement only by squirrel and jay scold-calls.
Another crystal-clear morning. The roar of traffic from over the ridge dies down as the air warms, leaving the jeers of jays and the high whistles of waxwings.
Cloudy and cool with a 100% chance of falling walnuts—though admittedly, some are being dropped by squirrels. A red-bellied woodpecker keeps up an anxious commentry.