Flurries. The chittering call of a Cooper’s hawk; the small birds continue feeding. A strangled cry. Finally, the jay calls like a jay.
blue jays
There must be open water in the ditch: jay- and sparrow-shaped silhouettes are going up and down the dogwood’s laddered branches.
It’s snowing again. A blue jay keeps returning to the same high limb to eat snow, as if it can’t find that exact flavor anywhere else.
From over the ridge, a patrolman’s amplified voice, his words unintelligible. A blue jay does his best impression of a red-tailed hawk.
Bright and cold. A blue jay practices its red-tailed hawk scream at the top of a scarlet oak, half the leaves still there and gleaming.
Widely scattered drops of rain—a rustle twice as loud as it would’ve been a month ago. Blue jays yell back and forth about some new find.
The first holes have appeared in the forest wall, blue sky above the ridgeline leaking through. A dozen silent jays skim the treetops.
Blue overhead at sunrise; cloudy to the north. Bluejays jeer through the sunlit treetops, the margins of their tails white as semaphors.
The nasal call of a jay became the soundtrack of happiness one sun-drenched afternoon of my childhood. The place is gone now—a subdivision.
Foot-deep drifts across the porch, and the western ridge is plastered white. Above the snow-banshees, I hear blue jays calling.
Bitter wind, and a skim of new snow fills in the dips and wrinkles, making the icy snowpack look young again. The screech of a jay.
A half-grown barn cat crawls out from under the house, gray and bedraggled as a clump of drier lint. One jay rasping at the top of a locust.
Rust-colored leaves hiss and rustle under a slate-gray sky. A blue jay struggles to fly with its gullet full of nuts.
Now I realize why the Adirondacks seemed so quiet: no jays! One reconnoiters the porch, pivoting in front of my chair with an odd screech.