Overcast and cold. One by one the birds fly down to the stream, hop around, drink, fly up, and sing. Snowflakes blow past. A tree groans.
Overcast and bitter cold. A Carolina wren comes out from under the house and rummages in the dry leaves behind the oil tanks.
Sunny and cold. A titmouse call takes me back to that time one nested outside my window and woke me each morning like an elfin rooster.
Snow blowing off the trees mingles with fresh flakes. Cloud shadow subsumes tree shadows like a malnourished rabbit reabsorbing her young.
Sky and ground both flat white. A squirrel missing a quarter of her tail is fossicking through the snow, ignored by a high-speed chipmunk.
Bird tracks in the snow next to the house like meandering lines of cuneiform verse, breaking off at odd points where something took flight.
Something has been ripping into the old hornet’s nest on the porch ceiling: pieces of its gray paper litter the fresh snow. A wren flies in.
Cold air, bright sun. A song sparrow in the barberry bush sings continuously for nearly a minute—manic in a way I’ve never heard before.
As if in answer to the stream’s soprano babble, the bugling of migrant geese, their V breaking and rewriting itself as they pass overhead.
As the temperature climbs above freezing, the icy surface of the snowpack loses its sheen, clouding over like the eye of a dead fish.
After a night of high winds, the forest has several new squeaks and groans, but my light-weight chair hasn’t moved. I sit down warily.
Late morning and the rain stops, the fog lifts to reveal the same snow-clad mountain as before. The distant sound of an engine being revved.
Overcast. A song sparrow’s song. Chipmunks break their habitual solitude to dash across the hard snowpack, fighting, looking for mates.
The sun grows and shrinks as the clouds change in thickness. Two wrens pop out at once from under the porch, one on each side—vociferous.