Another classic October morning, crisp and clear. From the sun-struck treetops, a brown-headed cowbird’s liquid note. In the still air, a falling leaf spirals and somersaults, taking its time.
Plummer’s Hollow
Cold and still at dawn, with pink clouds emerging from the engines of a jet. A white-throated sparrow pipes up. Something on four feet runs off through the deepening leaf duff.
Cold and still, with a wash of cirrus clearing off after sunrise. Sound is out of the east, so instead of the usual roar of interstate traffic, I hear the shrill beeping of quarry trucks reversing to be filled and the grumbling of stones.
A cold front has delivered October’s bright blue weather right on schedule. Yellow leaves flutter down in the breeze. A Carolina wren draws again and again from a seemingly inexhaustible well of song.
Sunrise brings birdsong: a Tennesee warbler’s blur of high notes answered by a towhee’s interrogatory tweet, and a white-throated sparrow’s “Oh, sweet Canada” giving way to the reedy whistles of cedar waxwings, tut-tutting robins, and a winter wren’s liquid braid.
A sunrise muted by cirrus. Dew dripping from the roof. The undeniable brownness of leaves that had been bright as holiday cards: death has taken that holiday, it seems.
Mist dissipating into blue. The walnut trees on the north side of the house are now nearly bare, even as the one on the south side is still more green than yellow. The sun briefly blazes through a new hole in the hillside canopy.
Overcast but not gloomy. Above the usual yammering of a red-bellied woodpecker, I catch a few phrases of warbler buzz: cerulean, I think.
Cloudy at sunrise, the sky takes its time clearing off. A walnut splats down on the driveway, trailed by a fluttery entourage of yellow leaves.
Steady rain. An hour past daybreak, it begins to get dark again. The rain comes down harder. A cardinal chirps.
Rain in widely scattered drops, a light seasoning over everything. It intensifies; a half-molted walnut tree begins leafleting the yard. It tapers off. A squirrel chisels open a nut.
Damp, overcast and quiet. The sprawling old white lilac battling a blight is once again flowering, with a dozen half-sized clusters at the ends of ravaged limbs looking less like white flags than signal fires: a fight to the death.
The first rain in weeks begins tapping on the roof at dawn. Then it’s here in a rush, the bone-dry leaf duff rattling into a roar.
Heavily overcast: a rain sky with no rain. Up in the woods, a Cooper’s hawk begins to chirp, answered seconds later by a red-tailed hawk. The two hawks exchange calls for several minutes before falling silent and letting the jays take over.