Fresh from drinking out of the cold stream, a chickadee swipes its bill rapidly against a twig, then goes to join the others in the birches.
black birch
The croak of a raven followed by a tree popping in the cold, loud as a gunshot. A chickadee flits through the branches of a birch, singing.
The silhouettes of small birds (goldfinches?) darting through the crown of a black birch as wind and driving rain strip it of leaves.
Every morning more shards of ridge-top sky are visible through the trees. In the black birch’s yellow crown, yellow-rumped warblers.
With every gust of wind, a mob of yellow leaves comes swirling out over the meadow. From just inside the woods’ edge, the crash of a limb.
All the stiltgrass has turned burgundy—”the wine-dark yard.” In the woods, a steady procession of falling birch leaves.
Were there really just two of them? Now every yellow birch leaf trembling in the breeze looks like another migrant warbler.
The birch tree trembles with a flock of migrant warblers; I catch flashes of yellow and olive green. A yellow leaf tumbles to the ground.
A blue-headed vireo foraging in a birch tree eats as it sings: slow and deliberate, a swallow of insect followed by a few, short notes.
The soft colors of trees just coming into blossom: birch, elm, shadbush. The bright yellow on yellow of a bumblebee visiting the daffodils.
The bright sun frees a leaf in the yard from a new fur of snow; a cold breeze raises it from the dead and sends it sailing over the house.
Wind and a little new snow have softened the landscape’s hardest edges. The birches squeak like beginning fiddlers trying to get in tune.
Five golden-crowned kinglets forage in the crown of a birch. In a nearby barberry, a junco ticks sporadically like an uncommitted clock.
A dusting of snow on every branch and twig. In the half-dark, kinglets bob in the top of a black birch—their high, thin calls.