Cold with a patchwork sky in which some pink appears and fades. The red squirrel scolds from its hole high in a locust as a gray squirrel leaps from birch to birch.
black locust
January 3, 2025
Cold and still. A tall black locust is loud with squirrel claws. Snowflakes as fine as dust begin to fall.
October 10, 2024
Clear and cold, with a faint patch of frost on the barn roof. Winged tulip tree seeds litter the porch. A red-bellied woodpecker tuts from the top of a tall locust.
September 5, 2024
A dawn too cold for crickets, and still except where a squirrel makes a branch tremble. From the top of a black locust, a hairy woodpecker’s nasal chirps.
August 23, 2024
Another cold, clear morning. Robins streaked by the molt contend with blue jays for the best perches in the tops of the tall locusts, answering jeers with tuts.
July 25, 2024
Cloudy and damp, with long intervals between bird calls. A small woodpecker’s improbably loud rattle from the black locusts sets off a pair of Carolina wrens.
June 17, 2024
Clear and still. A flicker’s eponymous chant from the sunlit crown of a black locust. The black raspberries in my yard are already blood-red.
May 2, 2024
A warm breeze at sunrise. My reading is interrupted by an unfamiliar trill: a redheaded woodpecker in the dead crown of the tallest black locust. I watch through binoculars as he works over the tree and himself, probing under bark one moment and under his wing the next.
May 27, 2023
Another clear, cold morning with little dew. Goldfinches gad about in the tops of the locusts, seemingly oblivious to other birds’ territorial obsessions.
April 20, 2023
Hen turkey calling at sunrise like a rusty machine pleading for oil, the tom interrupting with his usual non sequitur. A squirrel noses the stump of a freshly felled locust.
February 15, 2023
High clouds yellow with sunrise appear to have some business off to the east. A downy woodpecker on a dead locust limb fires off a blast beat.
December 8, 2022
A late-morning brightness in the clouds. A white-breasted nuthatch descending a tall black locust turns right-side-up.
September 17, 2022
Thin fog at sunrise. A pileated woodpecker lands on the side of a tall locust tree and gets bum-rushed by a squirrel.
August 10, 2022
Milk-white sky and the white noise of tree crickets. A pileated woodpecker cackles to herself at the top of a tall locust.