Cloudy and cool. The shed skin of a rat snake has blown off the back roof and dangles in the branches of a walnut. In the next tree over, a gray squirrel walks to the end of a limb, sniffing each walnut, and picks the one at the very end.
Plummer’s Hollow
Sun through thin cirrus. Half an hour of a hawk hunting the yellow woods and I have yet to catch a glimpse, tracking its movement only by squirrel and jay scold-calls.
Another crystal-clear morning. The roar of traffic from over the ridge dies down as the air warms, leaving the jeers of jays and the high whistles of waxwings.
Cloudy and cool with a 100% chance of falling walnuts—though admittedly, some are being dropped by squirrels. A red-bellied woodpecker keeps up an anxious commentry.
A knife-thin moon fades into the dawn sky. The only cloud huddles in the bottom corner of the meadow, where a phoebe is calling.
There’s more yellow than ever in the woods’ edge trees, in the spicebushes, in the meadows filled with goldenrod, and now the sun—the opposite of mellow among the yellow leaves of a black birch.
Mounds of white snakeroot in the yard glow dimly in the light of a half moon. Orion gets one leg over the ridge before he starts to fade, and the soft calls of migrant thrushes fill the trees.
Under a cacophony of jays, a doe and two fawns with their spots all gone graze just inside the edge of the woods. One does a sudden dance, spinning around to elude a fly.
Sun in the treetops, joined by jays in noisy, acorn-gathering joy. A pewee bends a note. The distant grind of the quarry.
Clear and still, with dew dripping off the roof and a pair of phoebes yelling “Phoebe!” at each other. Twenty-four years ago, the sky was just this clear.
Canada geese, a screech owl, some crows, and the inevitable wren sing in the sunrise, the western ridge turning red under a flat-tire moon.
Another cold sunrise. A distant Carolina wren song prompts the wren roosting atop my heating oil tank to come flying out singing and land in the bracken.
Cold, clear, and still at sunrise, with little sign of the more than two million birds who streamed overhead during the moonlit hours aside from a few soft, scattered chirps.
Partly cloudy and cool at sunrise, with more yellow and orange leaves than I’ve ever seen this early in the fall: not just walnut and black gum but black birch, tulip poplar, and even a few maples, just as our 30 acres of goldenrod approach their peak of bloom. I’m reminded of the Chinese name for San Francisco: old gold mountain.