Brightening sky. I watch a chipmunk on the wall beside the porch making her “chuck” call, so loud—using the stone as a resonator.
Waiting for rain, everything sounds like an augury—catbird, chipmunk, great-crested flycatcher—and just before the first drops, that hush.
The dame’s-rocket is at its height; my overgrown front yard is the equal of any garden. The catbird seems to concur.
The black cherry blossoms are already fading, and the sun is going from dandelion-yellow to dandelion seedhead-white. Black-billed cuckoo.
Cool morning. The melancholy sweetness of a wood thrush song. At the woods’ edge, the small black cherry has gone to bloom.
Mid-morning and it’s already hot. The black locusts—last to leaf out—have a fresh green fuzz. A carpenter bee inspects the roof.
A nocturnal visitor has dug up four of my herbs, tunneling into the compost. Below the porch, a least flycatcher, handsome in his eye rings.
Even on a morning this incomparable I can be squinting at my phone and nearly miss the sun on a hummingbird’s back.
Up early enough for the last of the dawn fog and the wood pewee’s dreamy chant. Two rabbits graze side-by-side in the road.
The catbirds are much more furtive now going into the barberry that hides their nest. Two cuckoos call up a bit of rain.
Through the shining leaves, I gaze at the last shards of ridgetop sky, listening to a red-eyed vireo and wishing I’d gotten a bit more sleep.
The forest is so green it almost hurts to look at it, and it smells delicious, too: wild azalea’s honeysuckle scent. Two chipmunks’ warring metronomes.
Say what you will about cold spring nights; they lead to gorgeous mornings. And what’s that stunning black-and-white bird? Only a downy woodpecker.
The light this morning is so crystalline, the new leaves so intensely green, it’s no surprise to hear the year’s first oriole—that song.