Up before dawn, I watch the morning star climbing through the treetops. The birds awake: fragments of song like an orchestra tuning up.
Dave Bonta
May 25, 2010
Wood thrushes dart back and forth; three squirrel species briefly converge. My yard is less comprehensible to me than a street in Bangkok.
May 24, 2010
The female towhee chitters until the male flies in, mates, and flies off. Again. Once more. Then she craps and goes back to foraging.
May 23, 2010
Light rain. A female towhee carries load after load of dead grass into a rosebush while a yearling male redstart sings and noshes in the treetops.
May 22, 2010
A dandelion-seed parachute drifting past the porch shudders, hit by a raindrop. The streambank grass ripples where a chipmunk runs.
May 21, 2010
The clouds finally thin out at mid-morning. An orange skipper passes over the thin-bladed grass to settle on the sunny half of a dock leaf.
May 20, 2010
So clear, even the mourning dove sounds joyful. Muffled thuds of a pileated in a dead tree, knocking—as Rumi would say—from the inside.
May 19, 2010
Cool and quiet—a thoroughly dull morning, I’m thinking. Just then a hen turkey lands in the yard with a clamor of wings and saunters off.
May 18, 2010
Hard rain forces the phoebes to dive into the weeds in search of prey, returning drenched to their dry and querulous brood under the eaves.
May 17, 2010
A blue-gray gnatcatcher hoovering insects from the cherry leaves hovers almost like a hummingbird, I think, until the real thing zooms by.
May 16, 2010
At daybreak, a small deer leaps and twists like a bronco with an invisible rider, then careens through the purple haze of dame’s-rocket.
May 15, 2010
From the luminous green wall of the woods, a pewee calls. Maple keys come spinning, take the place of yesterday’s hailstones on the porch.
May 14, 2010
Yes, I can watch tanagers in the treetops, a hooded warbler in the bush. But just over the ridge, the interstate howls. There’s no escape.
May 13, 2010
From the moment I come out, the world conspires to wake me up: yesterday, the tulip tree dropped a branch; today, a Cooper’s hawk swoops in.