Drizzle thinning into wind-blown mist by mid-morning. The sky brightens. A pileated woodpecker clings to a skinny locust tree as it sways in the breeze, taps a few times and then tilts her head to the side as if listening for a response.
black locust
Overcast and cool. A pileated woodpecker flies into the dead top of the tallest black locust in the yard, seemingly oblivious to a swirling conflict between a small flock of local jays and two migrant sharp-shinned hawks. A slow inspection of the treetop turns up nothing worth tapping for, and she flies off, leaving the tree to the jays.
Clear, cool, and breezy—a week to the day after our last dry high. Six crows sit on dead branches atop the two tallest locust trees in the yard. One minute past sunrise, they look all around, shift on their perches, and take flight.
Cool and clearing after yesterday’s storms. A red-bellied woodpecker calls from a dead limb at the top of the tallest black locust, making it sway. Below him on another dead branch, a fledgling is being fed by its mother.
Clear and cool—the first morning of a dry high. A hummingbird visits the orange jewelweed below the porch. A pungent, camphor-like odor makes me think of blossoming yarrow, but I finally decide instead it’s coming from the black locust limbs smashed down in a storm more than a week ago.
Foggy and cool. I sit enjoying the deep stillness, gazing at the wreckage from last night’s storm—two black birches smashed down by the top half of a black locust—and anticipating the chainsaw’s roar.
Bright sun and cedar waxwings whistling in the top of the tall black locust at the woods’ edge, which I see has finally almost leafed out.
Sunrise sky like an illuminated manuscript: that blue, that gold leaf. The red squirrel pokes its head out of its hole in the black locust behind the spinghouse to give everything a resounding scold.
The sky and ground nearly rhyme in their oppressive whiteness. A red squirrel sounds as if he’s having a psychotic break, trying to defend a hollow black locust no doubt stuffed with acorns and walnuts.
Gray skies with a bitter wind. Colored leaves fly past. A pair of gray squirrels meet on the trunk of a black locust and touch snouts.
A warm breeze abuzz with hummingbirds and mosquitoes. A red-eyed vireo sings a few notes and falls silent. Inside a hollow locust tree, something is beating.
Clear at sunrise with an eyelash moon and a deer grazing just inside the woods’ edge. A Cooper’s hawk calls from atop the tallest black locust and flies off to the east.
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.
Cold and still. A tall black locust is loud with squirrel claws. Snowflakes as fine as dust begin to fall.