Sun through a thin milk of clouds. A lull in birdsong, punctuated by a didactic ovenbird and the rose-breasted grosbeak’s brilliant warble.
Plummer’s Hollow
Five degrees below freezing. The lilac leaves are already big enough to show their backs to the wind. Four white narcissuses bob and sway.
Cloudy and cold. One of the local redtails is hunting along the woods’ edge, flying from branch to branch, head swiveling all about.
The tulip trees have burst their buds—a gray-green haze. Hermit thrush in my left ear, thunder in my right.
Sunlight softened by high-altitude haze. The hermit thrush is still around, dreamily singing up on the ridge, ignoring the boorish wren.
Cool beginning of a day forecast to be hot. The high, thin whistles of waxwings. A fantastically dissonant freight train horn.
A 30-second rain. I count nine shades of green, all circled by a cardinal in his flame-colored cap. The daffodils once again stand erect.
Clear at dawn. A pale slice of moon in the treetops, and below, the ethereal song of a hermit thrush.
Heavily overcast. The patchy yellow of a goldfinch and the spicebush he sits in, grooming his breast feathers.
Birdcalls echo off an icy snowpack for maybe the last time this spring. Backlit by the sun, the lilac glows intensely green against the snow.
Gauzy curtains of snow falling from the treetops—six inches’ worth—even as more snowflakes start coming down. The wind’s work is never done.
White sky slowly disappearing the sun like a pregnant rabbit reabsorbing her litter. Cedar waxwings come whistling down to the stream to drink.
Looking through a series of thin screens: swirling snowflakes, greening lilac, yellow forsythia, bare trees, holey clouds.
Rainy, breezy and intermittently bright. The zigzag flight of a phoebe finding breakfast above the daffodils.