A cool morning with the sky mostly clear and sound out of the east: the limestone quarry’s reverse-chirping trucks, muffled clanks and booms. A squirrel high in the tree next to the road picks a walnut, sniffs it, and lets it fall with a crash.
Dave Bonta
Overcast but bright. Neither warm nor cool. A Cooper’s hawk dives at a squirrel on a walnut tree at the woods’ edge, misses, then takes fright when the squirrel turns and charges at it, and lands on a nearby limb to take stock and ruffle its feathers before taking off.
Overcast and cool, with showers of yellow black walnut leaflets in the slightest breeze. A gray squirrel climbs a small tree next to the lilac, presses its snout to each of three walnuts, and climbs back down.
A screech owl trilling in the half-dark sounds thinner and more uncertain than usual—a juvenile, perhaps? When it falls silent, a whippoorwill calls, sounding equally tentative, and soon stops. From the woods’ edge, the soft calls of all-night migrants dropping in to rest and forage.
Sun glistening in the treetops. Down-hollow, a pileated woodpecker drums on a baritone snag. The first bumblebee visits the jewelweed, no crickets to muffle the hum of her solitary motor.
The streak of a meteor below the crescent moon doesn’t reach the thin ground fog. I watch the stars fade until only Rigel remains—Orion’s left foot. It slips from view fifteen minutes before sunrise. A minute later, the first mosquito whines in my ear.
A white sky at mid-morning beginning to glow as the clouds thin, while below in the meadow the white snakeroot is beginning to bloom. I find a dogwood sawfly larva from a later instar than yesterday’s fluffy white grubs; this is a proper green caterpillar crawling across my shirt.
Overcast and cool. When I tire of feeding myself to the mosquitoes, I don a bug hat and go into the yard with my phone to identify whatever has been skeletonizing trees and shrubs: angle-lined prominent moth caterpillars on the bigtooth aspen, pinstriped in green but too hairy to be extra twigs, and dogwood sawfly larvae on the silky dogwoods, curled into fat white moons.
Daybreak comes in a lull between storms. An orange leaf spirals down at the woods’ edge as thunder rumbles off to the east, and now again in the west. A green stink bug crawls under the arm of my green chair.
Everything drips from rain in the wee hours. I notice that the white lilac at the woods’ edge is blooming again, and more vigorously then it did in the spring, before months of assault from whatever disease has been decimating its leaves. There’s an almost ghostly presence to these new white inflorescences, appearing alongside a flush of fresh green.
Humid, overcast and warm. Half-way between the crickets in the grass and the cicadas in the treetops, the Carolina wren’s teakettle teakettle teakettle lets off steam.
At least half the leaves on the walnut trees in my yard have turned yellow now, still glistening from a shower at dawn. The red-eyed vireo who was calling then is still going strong three hours later.
Overcast and cool. A sudden thumping under the floor, and a small groundhog goes running out into the garden, followed by the head of a larger groundhog, who turns to look at me over the end of the porch. After a minute-long staring contest, she drops out of sight.
Moonlit dawn. A screech owl quavers, prompting a barred owl to hoot. As light builds in the east, a whippoorwill begins to shriek.