Clear and cold. The red squirrel I’ve been hearing scold finally appears, racing up a bare walnut tree just as a deer hunter drags the first kill of the season out of the woods.
Dave Bonta
Breezy and cool at dawn. Migrants trade notes as they explore the forest edge: towhee, phoebe, thrush. A lost passenger jet comes roaring overhead.
Clear and cold, with more sky showing through the ridgetop trees. A raucous assembly of crows gives way to ravens—their resonant croaks.
Before dawn, before the nearby quarry starts up, you can almost hear the stars glittering. In a dark enough sky, it turns out that Orion has a whole nest of stars for a head.
More clouds than sun. A smell of woodsmoke. Stillness haunted by the distant sounds of wheels and engines.
Cold and still, with yesterday’s rain still dripping from the trees, and fog shot through with sunlight rising into blue. Scattered chirps give little indication of the hordes of migrants brought in by the front.
Another dark, rainy dawn. I can’t stop thinking of my last dream before waking, in which I had died and reincarnated as a deer. I had so many legs, and everything was delicious!
The rain slackens toward mid-morning and I can hear chirps and twitters: warblers in their muted autumn colors foraging for breakfast in the treetops.
Rain. The rumble of a distant jet. A squirrel crouches on a limb with her tail over her head, chiseling open a walnut.
The rain goes on and on for hours. I watch a drenched squirrel at the end of a branch lose his grip on a walnut. A small brown moth circles my face.
Before daybreak, the crooning and snarling of raccoons up in the woods. In the silent aftermath, something large and dead crashes down.
Fog that lasts for hours, blurring the lines between night and day, and between sky and ground for night-flying migrants now foraging all along the woods’ edge—a cloud full of food.
Overcast and damp. Anxious notes from a nuthatch following the crash of a rotten limb up in the woods where a screech owl had been trilling.
Dark and rainy at sunrise, the cardinal like a pilot light in the recesses of the lilac chirping back and forth with his mate.