Thick fog alive with robin and red-winged blackbird song. The spring gurgles under the yard. The wingbeats of a crow pass overhead.
American robin
A mid-morning break in the rain. A red-winged blackbird calls once as the fog retreats to the ridgetop. Robins tut-tut. An altercation breaks out among the red-bellied woodpeckers.
Sunrise delayed for a few minutes by a low bank of clouds. A gray squirrel emerges from its nest high in a black cherry and dashes down the newly exposed trunk. A robin adds a few tut-tuts to the chorus of white-throated sparrows.
Sunrise from under a lid of cloud turning the ridge orange. The robin sings a few bars. A propellor plane fades into the distance.
Five degrees below freezing and half-cloudy at dawn, clearing off by sunrise. The robin is missing in action, offering no competition for the caroling of a Carolina wren.
Dawn. A last glimpse of the moon through the clouds as the torrent of robin song is joined by a cardinal, a phoebe, the wren.
Patches of blue, and a pair of hawks arrowing north silhouetted against the clouds. An inversion layer brings traffic noise from over the ridge, but a robin’s soliloquy is the loudest thing.
Thin, high clouds—enough to blur the edges of shadows. Whenever the robin pauses for breath, I can hear a phoebe calling up by the barn. Spring is here.
Another crystal-clear dawn. A song sparrow and a Carolina wren are trading licks, following initial solos from a robin and a cardinal, all over the whine of traffic.
The sun! A robin answers the Carolina wren as a pileated woodpecker hammers away at a hollow black walnut tree.
Another cold, clear morning. Robins streaked by the molt contend with blue jays for the best perches in the tops of the tall locusts, answering jeers with tuts.
A break in the clouds allows a bit of sunrise to stain the treetops, where a noisy kestrel gets dive-bombed by a robin. A pair of black cherry trees are in bloom—white snouts pointing in all directions.
Red spreading from the clouds to the western ridge. Robin, cardinal, phoebe: the early-spring trio, joined by a downy woodpecker on percussion with a high-pitched dead limb.
The sun finally clears the one, thin cloud above the horizon only to disappear into a thicket. The robin has taken a break, so the titmouse holds forth.