Overcast at sunrise. Each breeze brings a brief shower from a midnight storm. A mosquito wallows in the long hair of my forearm.
Dave Bonta
White sun in a white sky crossed by crows. Twittering goldfinches have the mid-morning chorus mostly to themselves, aside from one dogged towhee.
I feel like a salamander, slick with moisture from hiking in 98% humidity. The first flies are beginning to buzz about, anticipating the sun burning through the fog.
Fog lingering into mid-morning. The sprawling lilac at the far edge of the yard is now more than half-brown with leaf-spot disease, brought on by this endless rainy season. The mullein stalk still follows its yellow flowers into the sky.
Another warm and humid morning. A brown butterfly lands on my book and closes its wings to show a row of eyespots: Little Wood Satyr. In the deep shade next to the springhouse, a twig snaps under a paw or hoof.
Out before sunrise, where the humidity has become visible: a thin fog through which I swim, leaving the porch for an early-morning hike to beat the heat.
Cool, clear and humid at sunrise. I watch a crow family waking up on their roost in an oak, the fledglings softly begging from the adults, who stretch and scratch.
Up for moonset and sunrise—both hidden by clouds. The dark yard, punctuated by the apostrophes of top-heading garlic, has a crow for a rooster.
Overcast and cool. Up on the ridge, a Cooper’s hawk calls once—a workman’s sudden, colorful string of curses—and falls silent. A towhee comes out into the meadow to sing.
Cool, cloudy and humid. A paper wasp drinks rainwater from a spicebush leaf. In the front garden, hummingbirds circle the purple, mop-headed bergamot.
The plaintive cries of what sounds like a fledgling crow up in the woods accompany the awkward sorties of a fledgling phoebe, beak snapping on a missed insect. Blue sky appears.
A cool and humid sunrise, with the silence of a long holiday weekend continuing to linger. The buzz of a hummingbird. A firefly goes past with his unlit lantern.
Clear and cool at sunrise. In the holiday-morning silence, a worm-eating warbler’s dry rattle in the woods accompanies the catbird singing in the yard and field sparrows in the meadow. A crow. The rumble of a jet.
Out at dawn for the cardinal’s opening salvo and a mosquito nuzzling my neck. The twittering of goldfinches. An east-bound freight blows its horn.