A dark and rainy dawn. One especially well-harmonized train horn and the sparrows and wrens wake up.
Plummer’s Hollow
Gloomy with a few drops of rain. I spot a new-to-me Virginia creeper six feet from the porch: that crimson.
The last clear morning for a while. A red-tailed hawk flies through the bare birches, trailed by two outraged crows.
Sunrise inches forward, chirp by chirp: towhee, white-throated sparrow. A rabbit gazes at me from the end of the porch with eyes dark as cisterns.
With the understory losing its leaves, the forest is threadbare, shot through with light. In the herb bed, a volunteer tomato is in bloom.
Sunrise. Fingers of orange light through orange leaves. After the furnace cycles off, the silence seems enormous.
Cloudy and cold. In the thinning treetops, a squirrel takes a wild leap to lose a suitor. Tulip tree samaras helicopter down.
The last star blinks out just as rain begins to tap on the roof. A spring pepper calls. Dawn begins to seem like a possibility.
Just past sunrise. Ground fog in the meadow full of white-throated sparrows. A screech owl trills from the powerline.
In thin fog, the soft notes of juncos and white-throated sparrows taking their morning baths in the shelter of a dogwood beside the springhouse.
Still, with a flat-white sky. The throat-rattles of a crow chasing off a sharp-shinned hawk. The black birches fill with kinglets.
Misty and overcast, with intermittent showers of small birds in the treetops. A European hornet lands on the railing to clean her mouthparts.
The smell of rain without rain falling until past full daylight, and all the chirps and calls of migrants foraging and settling in to roost.
Fifteen minutes after sunrise, the sky darkens again. The fierce yet querulous cries of a Cooper’s hawk skimming the treetops.