Five degrees below freezing and still. A red-winged blackbird calls from a sunlit treetop above the springhouse and its tiny cattail marsh.
Dave Bonta
It’s overcast and near freezing, but as soon as I step onto the porch, the worries that kept me awake half the night vanish. The woods’ edge is a gallery of swollen buds, blossoms, catkins and tiny leaves. Turkey gobbles blend with a train’s mournful horn.
Cool with a clearing sky at sunrise. A blue-headed vireo’s soliloquy. The smell of damp earth.
A heavy white sky giving few hints of sunrise. In the distance, the faint bells of a wood thrush. A field sparrow’s accelerating rush toward silence.
Just past sunrise, a vagrant red squirrel appears in the yard, given away at first by her nervous, jerky movements as she forages for breakfast, then the old-barn color as she emerges from the lilac’s shadow, head swiveling about.
The bridal wreath bush that persists in the shadow of the old lilac is in bloom—the only time of year I remember its existence. From just above it come the buzzy notes of a black-throated green warbler. The sky turns white.
In the last few minutes before the sun crests the ridge, ghosts lingering among the trees turn back into blossoming shadbush. A chickadee is singing his spring song.
A still morning after last night’s violent storms. The tulip trees have burst their buds—a pale green haze. A few high clouds in the east turn purple.
Still and crystal-clear at sunrise. A couple of whines from a hen turkey conjure up a gobble from the ridgetop. The blue-headed vireo’s soliloquy.
The trees still sway after their all-night rave with the wind. The tall serviceberry at the woods’ edge is in bloom: pale foam against heavy, gray clouds.
Wind throbs in the treetops; the birdcall app thinks it’s a drumming grouse. Juncos twitter from the lilac, which has just burst its buds—a green apparition against the brown woods.
Dawn comes during a break in the rain, building from one lone cardinal to a phoebe singing contest to a mob of crows. From the pipe under the road, a winter wren’s soft cascade.
Rainy and cool. An eastern towhee is urging me—according to the time-honored birders’ mnemonic—to drink my tea, while woodpeckers large and small bang their heads against the trees.
In the half-light, a Louisiana waterthrush’s jumble of notes. The sky is nearly clear. Peonies are raising red hands out of the earth.