Another cold morning. During a pause in the robin’s song, I can hear the spring peepers’ tireless ME ME ME ME ME down in the marsh.
American robin
The yard’s alive with birds: sparrows, jays, robins. In the yellowing wall of foliage at the woods’ edge, I see the first chinks of sky.
A juvenile robin grooming in the cherry tree, light feathers dotting its dark back—scruffy as a teenage boy’s first beard. The sun comes up.
Robins mating on a branch: one-second contacts spaced half a minute apart. Each time the male flies off and the female ruffles her feathers.
A male robin scours the forest floor for twigs; the female combs the lawn for dead grass. The small thorn bush shakes when they both fly in.
Rain. Have robins always had white spots on the ends of their tails? Yesterday afternoon, four eastern kingbirds in the field—unmistakeable.
Somewhere in the fog, a red-winged blackbird, a pair of mourning doves, a robin, a flock of finches. Half an hour later, nothing but rain.
A heavy inversion layer—I have quarry trucks for company this morning. Over the roar, from the corner of the field, the first singing robin.
Rain and fog. A robin drops into the barberry bush, tut-tutting. Up in the woods, two deer stand with their heads buried in the soft snow.
Ground-level clouds appear and disappear in the half-dark; even the thermometer is fogged up. Over the roar of the stream, a robin’s song.