A cooler sunrise this morning with wind from the north. A ruby-crowned kinglet warbles up and down the scale. A hen turkey picks her way through spring onions.
April 20, 2024
Cool with a clearing sky at sunrise. A blue-headed vireo’s soliloquy. The smell of damp earth.
April 20, 2023
Hen turkey calling at sunrise like a rusty machine pleading for oil, the tom interrupting with his usual non sequitur. A squirrel noses the stump of a freshly felled locust.
April 20, 2022
Birdcalls echo off an icy snowpack for maybe the last time this spring. Backlit by the sun, the lilac glows intensely green against the snow.
April 20, 2021
The early miniature daffodils are mostly done, hanging limp as burst balloons. Two chipping sparrows hop among them, pecking at the dirt.
April 20, 2020
Sun through thin cloud. A crow chases a raven through the treetops, dive-bombing it again and again. The raven’s furious croaks.
April 20, 2019
Low clouds of variable darkness. A turkey vulture flaps its wings, struggling to get aloft. The weather app says it will rain in 37 minutes.
April 20, 2018
Bright sun, icy breeze. Between creaks of a tree, a turkey’s gobble: like the engine turning over in a clown car. Daffodils bob and sway.
April 20, 2017
The rhyming couplets of a brown thrasher. A blue-headed vireo’s dreamy soliloquy. When the sun comes out, raindrops glisten on every twig.
April 20, 2016
A gnatcatcher crosses the yard. Its flight as erratic as a butterfly’s is punctuated by the briefest of pauses to ingest its eponymous prey.
April 20, 2015
A dull-gray morning full of the rattling of woodpeckers. A bluebird lands on a branch in the yard like an emissary from the weekend.
April 20, 2014
A Chinook helicopter flies low over the trees, with its twin rotors like a pair of malignant insects mating in flight, gravid with soldiers.
April 20, 2013
A few degrees above freezing. The sun’s still shining when the snow begins to fall, small flakes sifting down through the flowering trees.
April 20, 2012
A half-grown rabbit emerges from the rosebush and pauses in the middle of the blue driveway to shake its head and scratch behind its ears.