Two leaf-sized flames circle the trunk of a sunlit oak: pileated woodpeckers. Wings open like a fortuneteller’s deck of cards.
Dave Bonta
The low clouds are a patchwork of light and dark; the oaks change from brown to burgundy in the space of a minute. A bright curtain of rain.
In the middle of a still morning, a strange enthusiasm suddenly infects the birds, flitting, calling, gleaning, grooming, under a dull sky.
The crown of an oak that was green on Tuesday now glows orange in the sun. Every breeze shakes a fleet of helicopters out of the tulip tree.
A Carolina wren trills from the springhouse attic window, and a winter wren answers from under a pile of brush with ten seconds of song.
Bright lights appear on a storm-felled locust below my parents’ house—reflections from the second-storey windows. A hawk’s swift shadow.
Heavy frost. In the clear, still air, black birch leaves fall like rain. A pileated woodpecker dives cackling into the treetops.
At first light, I can’t get over the strangeness of a white ground below an opaque wall of woods. It’s magical, yes, but not in a good way.
The hush of snow against leaves like soft brushes playing on the skin of a drum. A chickadee calls, and then a nuthatch. Dee dee. Yank yank.
A wet blanket of snow has crushed the lilac and bowed down the flaming maples and still-green oaks. Every 30 seconds another crack or crash.
Cold rain rattles in the leaves. On the side of the house, an assassin bug with huge hind legs—about to die, it seems, with his boots on.
A patch of silver in the yard: first frost. A jet glints in the rising sun, its short contrail twice as bright as the crescent moon.
Rising late, I listen to loggers’ chainsaws from over the ridge to the west. The trees are almost at their peak of color. A distant crash.
Now I realize why the Adirondacks seemed so quiet: no jays! One reconnoiters the porch, pivoting in front of my chair with an odd screech.