Hard rain at dawn on International Migratory Bird Day, and all the calls blend into one. Yellow Baltimore field thrush, where are you?
Plummer’s Hollow
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.”
Great-crested flycatcher in the bare branches of a locust, silhouetted against the sky. A jet appears: no trail, just a gleaming splinter.
Mid-morning, through the screen door, faint bell-like notes. I put the phone down and rush out into the rain. The wood thrush is back.
Tiger and spicebush swallowtails circle the white lilac. Leaves blow backwards. A ruby-throated hummingbird hovers a foot from my nose.
The buzz of a black-throated green warbler, a catbird’s brassy solo, the noodling of a red-eyed vireo: May comes in with a new soundtrack.
Through green-gold leaves backlit by the sun, a scarlet flame and the slow, newspaper flap of black and white: pileated. The Good God Bird.
When I come out, I find my chair turned to the wall, two jets taking their trails along with them into the west, the sun’s flaming sword.
Windy at sunrise, and the thermometer’s arrow just past 32. I scan the low spots for frost, thinking about the oaks’ Rapunzel blooms.
A groundhog emerges from the stream and climbs the roadbank. I glance away for a moment and a turkey takes his place, shining like obsidian.
Drum of rain on the roof and the birds sound distant—robin, field sparrow, cowbird—the world greener than it’s been in seven months.
Sometime past 7:30, the birds fall silent for half a minute and there’s only fog, a slow drip from leaves no larger than squirrels’ ears.