Cloudy and cold at mid-morning. The high lisp of a brown creeper at the woods’ edge. In the distance, a gray squirrel is airing a complaint about a hawk.
brown creeper
Clear and still with frost in the yard and the gibbous moon caught in the treetops like a deflated balloon. A brown creeper sprials up a walnut tree. The sun comes up.
Rain easing off along with the dawn chorus. The sky brightens, and a brown creeper on the walnut tree beside the road bursts into song.
Rising late, I wonder what I’ve missed out on. The sun goes in. Two brown creepers scuttle around to the far side of the big tulip tree.
Pulling my hat down against the sun, I glimpse a brown creeper on the dark side of a trunk. Every breeze strips more leaves from the lilac.
One mound of November’s snow has survived into 2019. I’m watching a brown creeper but hearing a nuthatch—and all the voices of the stream.
Yard seething with birds: sparrows, chickadees, a brown creeper. A raven flies past with something in its bill, wings going pfft pfft pfft.
A brown creeper scuttles up an oak. A raven flies low over the house—its heavy wingbeats. The first brown thrasher appears in the lilac.
Over the wind, the twittering of chickadees trailing a flock of kinglets into the birches. Two brown creepers appear on adjacent trunks.
In the poor light, the quick movements of birds: those that chatter, those that flutter, those that scuttle like beetles, those that tap.
In the new snow, the splayed-hand tracks of an opossum cross the porch. A brown creeper busies itself on a tree at the wood’s edge.
A brown creeper ascends the trunk of a walnut tree, its jerky scuttling more insect-like than avian. Up on the ridge, a furious mob of crows.
A titmouse hops from one limb-stump to another on the newly truncated cherry snag. Five minutes later, a brown creeper scoots up the bole.
Solstice sunrise turns the western ridge red as an altar. A brown creeper fishes in all the dark valleys of the walnut tree’s bark.