A couple of cold nights and the yellow has spread like a contagion through the birches. A squirrel hangs down among the green walnuts.
black birch
Friday 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.
Monday December 06, 2021
Warmish. The sun almost emerges through thinning clouds, heralded by chickadees foraging high in the black birches at the edge of the woods.
Tuesday 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.
Thursday October 07, 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.
Sunday May 02, 2021
Like green tassels on Victorian lampshades the birch catkins fluttering in the breeze. It’s warm—a perfect day for tree sex.
Friday January 15, 2021
An unfeasibly large number of chickadees foraging along the woods’ edge, calling, singing, dangling from black birch twigs like mutant fruit.
Saturday October 17, 2020
As the rising sun glimmers through the trees, birch and walnut leaves begin to fall, the first hard frost glittering on the ground.
Friday October 16, 2020
Rainy and cold. White-throated sparrows call in different keys, each more plaintive than the last. The birches are fluttery with kinglets.
Friday April 03, 2020
Sun silvering black birch twigs. From the woods beyond, the call of a Cooper’s hawk. It can’t be long till the first shadbush blooms.
Sunday December 01, 2019
After hours of rain, woods and meadow are shrink-wrapped in ice. The black birch twigs creak as chickadees land to liberate a few seeds.
Sunday May 05, 2019
Rain. A black birch at the woods’ edge may regret its timing, shaggy orange catkins making it look like the most Victorian of lampshades.
Sunday November 25, 2018
A slit in the gray clouds widening to reveal the sun, like a sudden eye. Goldfinches feasting in the crown of a birch become silhouettes.
Tuesday November 06, 2018
With birches and maples at the woods’ edge all bare, I can see unimpeded up the hillside to small clouds lost among the trees and the rain.