Rain tapering off by eight. Even the fog looks green. Wild garlic plants in the yard are beginning to straighten, heads going up like herons trying to swallow large fish.
June 27, 2024
Clear and cool. Two Carolina wrens are burbling at the woods’ edge, while a cardinal is assaulting all the windows.
June 27, 2023
Clearing skies after a damp night. A Cooper’s hawk calls from just inside the woods’ edge—a single trill, if that’s what you call it. A ratchet. A round.
June 27, 2022
Everything drips. A wood thrush chases a rival out of the woods and pauses in a spicebush for a look around.
June 27, 2021
Perhaps just a bit fewer mosquitoes this morning. The double knock of a stone shifting under a squirrel’s weight.
June 27, 2020
Overcast and cool. The wood thrushes continue to call well past mid-morning. Beebalms are beginning to flaunt their spiky, scarlet coiffures.
June 27, 2016
Overcast. A towhee keeps singing the first two notes of his three-note song. Propped on the railing, my feet appear to anchor a spiderweb.
June 27, 2015
Fragments of vireo and goldfinch song mingle with the rain’s thunderous applause. A few filmy-winged insects still somehow manage to fly.
June 27, 2012
Next to the old dog statue, the sun catches one of the last dame’s-rocket blossoms—a faded purple footnote to a once extensive text.
June 27, 2011
Fog in the treetops, lit up by the sun. Wingbeats of a large bird. The distant chirping of quarry trucks in reverse, one high, one low.
A halictid bee pivots in the black… June 27, 2010
A halictid bee pivots in the black-eyed susan, a metallic green mote. At the end of one petal, a deerfly dries those anti-petals, its wings.
June 27, 2009
June 27, 2008
Another reason not to mow the lawn: a male common yellowthroat feeds a querulous fledgling in the tall grass directly in front of the porch.