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The Morning Porch

Daily short takes from an Appalachian hollow

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beetles

August 31, 2021 by Dave Bonta

Humid, overcast and cool. I study the flamboyant gestures of certain meadow plants already more than half-way dead. A fat beetle flies past.

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Categories Plummer's Hollow Tags beetles
July 24, 2021 by Dave Bonta

Mid-morning, and a wood thrush lands in the walnut tree next to the driveway to sing a few bars. A net-winged beetle flies past.

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Categories Plummer's Hollow Tags beetles, black walnut, netwing beetle, wood thrush
May 16, 2020 by Dave Bonta

A brown thrasher’s jazz echoes off the barn. In the clear plastic hummingbird feeder, a lampyrid beetle takes a very long time to drown.

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Categories Plummer's Hollow Tags beetles, brown thrasher
July 16, 2016 by Dave Bonta

A rabbit trots up the road, rounds the bend and continues past the house like the bearer of urgent news. A beetle with red elytra sails by.

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Categories Plummer's Hollow Tags beetles, cottontail
August 21, 2009 by Dave Bonta

Between showers, a shallow, orange V careens through the cherry’s dead limbs. Mating craneflies? No, a large beetle with orange elytra.

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Categories Plummer's Hollow Tags beetles, cherry tree

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On This Day

  • July 14, 2025
    Fog lingering into mid-morning. The sprawling lilac at the far edge of the yard is now more than half-brown with leaf-spot disease, brought on by this endless rainy season. The mullein stalk still follows its yellow flowers into the sky.
  • July 14, 2024
    In the early morning coolness, a soft thunder of deer hooves up in the woods. From overhead, the calls of purple martins already on the wing.
  • July 14, 2023
    The catbird mews and warbles, a hummingbird rockets back and forth, but it’s the mosquito’s still, small voice that gets my attention.
  • July 14, 2022
    Partly cloudy and cool. A large garter snake emerges from the stone wall and curls up on a sunny corner of the porch.
  • July 14, 2021
    Out in time for the tail end of the dawn chorus: field sparrow, red-eyed vireo, pewee, goldfinches, catbird. No more wood thrushes, alas.

See all...

Related book

Cover of Ice Mountain with a linocut of a big ridgetop tree.

What I do after I sit on the porch. One winter and spring's daily walks distilled into short poems with linocut illustrations by Beth Adams.

Header image: detail from Paper Garden by Clive Hicks-Jenkins (used by permission)

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