Heavily overcast and cold. A redstart is calling from above the springhouse—a buoyant buzz—while a distant wood thrush makes me revisit my dreams.
May 11, 2024
An hour past sunrise, an opossum is out hunting earthworms pushed out of their burrows by the all-night rain. She keeps pausing to raise her snout and sniff the air like a connoisseur.
May 10, 2024
Steady rain. A gnatcatcher flutters to find breakfast on the undersides of leaves, then retreats to the shelter of the lilac to shake the water off. A chipmunk runs under my chair to eat one seed at the far end of the porch.
May 9, 2024
Cool and increasingly cloudy as the sun clears the treetops—a bright spot in the gray. A rose-breasted grosbeak sings. Chipmunk metronomes go in and out of sync.
May 8, 2024
A damp sunrise after thunderstorms in the night. Waves of scent from the lilac, whose blossoms are beginning to fade and droop. The nonstop chatter of goldfinches.
May 7, 2024
An hour before sunrise, the blood-curdling shrieks and snarls of a raccoon, accompanied by the piping of her terrified kits. A barred owl offers commentary from the woods’ edge. I remain in the dark.
May 6, 2024
A green fog of leaves in fog. A pileated woodpecker’s thunderous drum finds no echo.
May 5, 2024
Gloomy sunrise, with a cloud snagged on the treetops, leaking rain. A titmouse takes advantage of a lull in the chorus to hype his own claim. A tanager’s plucked string.
May 4, 2024
Gentle rain. The intense green of new leaves everywhere but inside the ring of fencing around a tulip tree that appeared in my yard during the pandemic like a blessing. Its buds show no sign they’ll ever open again. I don’t know why.
May 3, 2024
The quarry’s dull roar: weather is out of the east. Hemmed in by green, the tall hawthorn hoards its mountain of snow.
May 2, 2024
A warm breeze at sunrise. My reading is interrupted by an unfamiliar trill: a redheaded woodpecker in the dead crown of the tallest black locust. I watch through binoculars as he works over the tree and himself, probing under bark one moment and under his wing the next.
May 1, 2024
Cloudless at sunrise, with rain still clinging to the grass. Tree leaves are on average half open now, making the woods’ edge half screen, half wall.
April 30, 2024
The sun rose while I was watching the moon. Now there’s a black-throated blue warbler at the woods’ edge whispering its three-syllable song.
April 29, 2024
Night and day overlap as the moon rises through the trees, serenaded by a family of barred owls, while the first song sparrow and cardinal herald the dawn. Then the whip-poor-will begins to shriek.