Daily short takes from an Appalachian hollow
Dave Bonta 
A cold front that began blowing in just before dawn has brought crystal clarity not just to the air but seemingly also to each bird call. Two wood thrushes tangle at the woods’ edge and retreat, each singing short phrases as if uncertain how their whole song goes.
Light rain. A large bumblebee buzzes past. The phoebe keeps making his sorties from the ring of old fencing around a volunteer red oak seedling, which no doubt appreciates the extra fertilizer.
Sun through thin clouds. A female cardinal foraging under the lilac picks up a twig, examines it, and sets it down again. Through the lilac limbs I spot the long legs of a deer picking her way across the road bank.
After hard rain in the night, the creek is high and babbles incoherently. The red squirrel runs past my feet with growing confidence in my harmlessness, only its ears poking up above the railing that separates us.
Rain tapers off by mid-morning, each iris leaf laden with shining encapsulations of the white sky. A small dinosaur known as a great-crested flycatcher calls at the woods’ edge.
A downpour tapers into hard rain and I can hear the birds again. Whatever the cerulean warbler might be asking, he doesn’t seem satisfied with a redstart’s insistent response.
Overcast and cool. In the yard below the porch, a scattering of white dewberry blossoms that I take for bird droppings at first, with phoebes flying back and forth from a nest somewhere close by that I have yet to find.
Almost all the local marmots appear within the space of a minute: a groundhog pokes its head up beside the porch, a chipmunk is chased out of the black walnut tree beside the road by a gray squirrel, and a red squirrel scolds from the springhouse.
Neither too cool nor too warm, with clouds yet to find the sun. The irises are at their peak of blooming in my front garden, and at the woods’ edge where several yellow ones survive as relics from an era of moved lawns and decorative fences fifty years ago.
After most of the other birds have run out of steam, a brown thrasher appears at the woods’ edge, singing loudly and repeating each phrase as he does, like a cheerleader for the sun just clearing the treetops.
An hour past sunrise, a gnatcatcher picks off the few survivors of a tent caterpillar colony in a black cherry at the woods’ edge. A hummingbird circles my red bandanna.
Sun glimmering through a scrim of cirrus. The aftermath of the dawn chorus isn’t exactly silent; it just has longer pauses for breath… until the goldfinches go gadding about through the treetops like a rickety circus.
Sun from under a lid of cloud illuminates the western ridge. A hooded warbler just inside the woods’ edge moves into the yard as the sky clears, keeping up his insistent chant for more than an hour.
Cool and mostly overcast. A phoebe hawks insects low to the ground. An hour later, I’m pleased to find I can now i.d. a yellow-throated vireo’s call—so much hoarser and more rushed than its red-eyed or blue-headed cousins.