Warmish and overcast at mid-morning, with a smudge for the sun. One calling phoebe sets all the others off, until the hollow is ringing with their chants.
Dave Bonta
The forsythia is fully in bloom, inconguous yellow against the brown woods—not unlike this apparition of a sun burning a hole through the gray clouds. Kinglets flit through the birches. The mourning dove falls silent.
Under gray skies, the old lilac is once again beginning to green up. The zig-zag flight of a phoebe gleaning breakfast out of thin air.
The sun rises behind the clouds, with the temperature right at freezing. Half of the daffodils lie face-down, the other half hold their heads high. Half the sky turns blue.
Clear and cold. The bird app identifies singers I cannot hear: ruby-crowned kinglet, American goldfinch, Canada goose. Ten minutes later, I do hear another lone goose go over, a slight note of panic in its honks.
After night-long rain, a gray almost-radiance. The black birches are looking sharp in their gray-green lichens. The creek is high and making little sense.
Sun finds the spokes of miniature daffodils opening beside the disease-ravaged lilac. I pull my hat-brim down to watch all the early insects already plying the cold spring air.
Weak sun through a sky more white than blue, where a plane is circling a thousand feet overhead. A tufted titmouse foraging on the thawed earth flies up into a spicebush to prize open a seed.
Cold and still. Sunlit stripes brighten between the trees as the songbird chorus dwindles to one energetic song sparrow in a spicebush next to the springhouse.
Cold and overcast after a night of rain. The creek is a full chorus. A crow alights in the big tulip tree, breaks off a twig and carries it away.
The cool start to a day with a forecast for heat. Red-bellied woodpeckers are winnying in the yard trees. Two or three daffodil buds are swelling into yellow.
Cool and partly sunny. A Cooper’s hawk flies from tree to tree at the woods’ edge, emitting its odd call, then heads off down-hollow, only to slip back five minutes later in silence.
Equinox. I make it out onto the porch just as the sun peeks over the ridge. Phoebes are calling. From the top of a walnut tree, the brown-headed cowbird’s liquid lisp.
Sunrise sung in by song sparrows. I peer at red clouds through a fence of dripping icicles from yesterday’s snow.