Three deer are running back and forth through the woods: flashes of white tails, the thunder of hooves. A small black birch nearly bare of leaves is a-flutter with kinglets.
black birch
March 29, 2024
A goldfinch foraging alone in the crown of a birch continues to warble, intonation rising and falling as if still in conversation with the flock. The sun muscles up through the ridgetop trees.
March 9, 2024
Rain and robin song. The sky darkens. The black birches look dapper in their gray-green suits of lichen.
February 23, 2024
Foggy at dawn with sound out of the east—the quarry instead of the interstate. Gray-green lichens glow on the rain-darkened trunks of sweet birches all along the edge of the woods.
December 23, 2023
Silhouetted against the dawn sky, a squirrel forages for birch seeds right where Venus was last seen, glimmering through thin clouds.
November 24, 2023
Overcast but bright. I watch small flocks of birds move through the tops of the birches: juncos, kinglets, goldfinches, each skeletal crown studded with winged jewels.
October 15, 2023
Overcast but brightening. Snow birds are moving through the half-bare lilac, exchanging notes. Titmice and chickadees forage in the thinning birches.
January 24, 2023
Sunrise layers of yellow and blue, cloud and clear. High in a black birch, two chickadees feed and squabble.
October 14, 2022
A hair above freezing. A pair of jays fresh from their ablutions ascend a flaming birch, gleaning insects on their way to the oaks.
September 24, 2022
A couple of cold nights and the yellow has spread like a contagion through the birches. A squirrel hangs down among the green walnuts.
December 10, 2021
Finches cluster high in a black birch, gorging in silence. A squirrel digs up a walnut and re-buries it on the other side of the road.
December 6, 2021
Warmish. The sun almost emerges through thinning clouds, heralded by chickadees foraging high in the black birches at the edge of the woods.
October 12, 2021
Still, with a flat-white sky. The throat-rattles of a crow chasing off a sharp-shinned hawk. The black birches fill with kinglets.
October 7, 2021
Rain and fog. With the goldenrod going gray, the yellow has moved from the meadow to the woods’ edge: spicebush, walnut, birch, elm, tulip tree.