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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

  • June 16, 2025
    An intensely green lushness makes an orphan out of the brown pile of juniper cuttings at the woods’ edge—last winter’s one spot of green. At 7:10, in the pouring rain, the first cicada starts up.
  • June 16, 2024
    Cool and quiet, with the sun half-dimmed by thin clouds. A series of loud wingbeats from the forest. A gurgle from my gut.
  • June 16, 2023
    The soft noise of steady rain; birdcalls sound half-submerged. I watch wisps of cloud drift through the yard.
  • June 16, 2022
    Hazy and humid. The sun in the crown of the big dead maple. A hen turkey putting like slow motor, summoning her chicks.​
  • June 16, 2021
    Clear and cold (46F/8C). A few, blue chinks in the green wall of leaves where the ridgetop oaks have been decimated by gypsy moth caterpillars.

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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