Hard rain forces the phoebes to dive into the weeds in search of prey, returning drenched to their dry and querulous brood under the eaves.
Plummer’s Hollow
A blue-gray gnatcatcher hoovering insects from the cherry leaves hovers almost like a hummingbird, I think, until the real thing zooms by.
At daybreak, a small deer leaps and twists like a bronco with an invisible rider, then careens through the purple haze of dame’s-rocket.
From the luminous green wall of the woods, a pewee calls. Maple keys come spinning, take the place of yesterday’s hailstones on the porch.
Yes, I can watch tanagers in the treetops, a hooded warbler in the bush. But just over the ridge, the interstate howls. There’s no escape.
From the moment I come out, the world conspires to wake me up: yesterday, the tulip tree dropped a branch; today, a Cooper’s hawk swoops in.
Two grackles appear at the woods’ edge, iridescent black against the brightest green of the year. In the garden, the first yellow iris.
Gray squirrel in a walnut tree gnawing on a walnut, fox squirrel in a maple feasting on maple keys: one spits out shells, the other, wings.
A chipping sparrow foraging below the porch at sunrise flits up to a branch with a beakful of fine, gray, nest-lining material: my own hair.
Breezy and just 3 degrees above freezing. A warbler marbled like a sideways zebra wheezes from the lilac: black-and-white, easiest of i.d.s.
Hard rain at dawn on International Migratory Bird Day, and all the calls blend into one. Yellow Baltimore field thrush, where are you?
Blue overhead at sunrise; cloudy to the north. Bluejays jeer through the sunlit treetops, the margins of their tails white as semaphors.
I ponder the walking onion in my herb bed—how did it get here? A hummingbird lands on the tip of a branch and shakes water from its wings.
So clear, it almost hurts: so blue, so green. And the yellow warbler singing what birders always hear as “sweet-sweet-sweet-I’m-so-sweet.”