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Daily short takes from an Appalachian hollow

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cedar waxwings

May 27, 2025 by Dave Bonta

Overcast and cool. As the wood thrush fades in the distance, the brown thrasher parodies his song. Waxwings whistle in the treetops. The sun almost comes out.

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Categories Plummer's Hollow Tags brown thrasher, cedar waxwings, clouds, wood thrush
June 29, 2022 by Dave Bonta

Cold and clear. Three waxwings join the sun high in the dead crown of a black locust, yellow bellies aglow.

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Categories Plummer's Hollow Tags black locust, cedar waxwings, sunrise
April 24, 2022 by Dave Bonta

Cool beginning of a day forecast to be hot. The high, thin whistles of waxwings. A fantastically dissonant freight train horn.

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Categories Plummer's Hollow Tags cedar waxwings, train

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On This Day

  • March 20, 2025
    Thin, high clouds—enough to blur the edges of shadows. Whenever the robin pauses for breath, I can hear a phoebe calling up by the barn.…
  • March 20, 2024
    Heavily overcast at mid-morning. I watch a squirrel surveying the yard from atop a stump, then loping over and retrieving a husked walnut from a…
  • March 20, 2023
    Clear and cold. All the while the sunrise seeps down from the treetops, a squirrel files away at a rock-hard black walnut shell to extract…
  • March 20, 2022
    Cold and gloomy—classic March weather for the equinox. A Cooper’s hawk calls from the treetops, underneath which two squirrels chase, oblivious.
  • March 20, 2021
    Equinox. A cowbird’s liquid note. My breath glows in the sunlight as if from the lungs of some gold buddha.

See all...

Related book

Cover of Ice Mountain with a linocut of a big ridgetop tree.

What I do after I sit on the porch. One winter and spring's daily walks distilled into short poems with linocut illustrations by Beth Adams.

Header image: detail from Paper Garden by Clive Hicks-Jenkins (used by permission)

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