All the stiltgrass has turned burgundy—”the wine-dark yard.” In the woods, a steady procession of falling birch leaves.
black birch
September 17, 2013
Were there really just two of them? Now every yellow birch leaf trembling in the breeze looks like another migrant warbler.
August 29, 2013
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.
April 30, 2013
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.
April 19, 2013
The soft colors of trees just coming into blossom: birch, elm, shadbush. The bright yellow on yellow of a bumblebee visiting the daffodils.
March 8, 2013
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.
February 9, 2013
Wind and a little new snow have softened the landscape’s hardest edges. The birches squeak like beginning fiddlers trying to get in tune.
November 10, 2012
Five golden-crowned kinglets forage in the crown of a birch. In a nearby barberry, a junco ticks sporadically like an uncommitted clock.
December 30, 2011
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.
November 22, 2011
Fog. High in a skeletal birch, the silhouettes of ten goldfinches are almost the right size for leaves, moving in their own slow wind.
October 23, 2011
Two pileated woodpeckers forage in the birches, scarlet crests glowing in the sun, the sky below them in the windshield of a parked truck.
September 23, 2011
At the woods’ edge, the yellowest birch seethes with small birds—kinglets, I think. But by the time I fetch binoculars, the tree is still.
July 6, 2011
Only when the begging cries of the crow fledglings finally cease do I notice the air’s clarity, golden light glistening on a black birch.
April 4, 2011
Kinglets move through the birches. I think of their statelets: hidden expandable nests, clutch that weighs as much as the bird that laid it.