Sun glimmering through a scrim of cirrus. The aftermath of the dawn chorus isn’t exactly silent; it just has longer pauses for breath… until the goldfinches go gadding about through the treetops like a rickety circus.
clouds
Sun from under a lid of cloud illuminates the western ridge. A hooded warbler just inside the woods’ edge moves into the yard as the sky clears, keeping up his insistent chant for more than an hour.
Heavily overcast and cold. A half hour past sunrise, only a field sparrow, a red-eyed vireo and an ovenbird still sing. A few goldfinches chitter in the treetops.
Cool and nearly clear, with cirrus coming in after sunrise, and the sun like an old soldier fading away as a truck rounds the bend of the road, hauling a new roof for the barn.
A flaming pink sky subsides into orange, then gray. A scattering of raindrops. A red squirrel follows a chipping sparrow’s rattle with one of its own.
Thin cloud, yet the sun’s still strong enough for leaf-glimmer and the shimmer of spider-silk strands already stringing tree to tree. A gray squirrel chases a red squirrel past my feet.
Sun through thin clouds on an unseasonably warm morning. A carpenter bee inspects my aging porch. Next to the old broken dog statue in my yard, the white narcissus is in bloom.
Under gray skies, the leaf buds of tulip trees are splitting open: green fuzz against the clouds. A cowbird’s liquid note.
Quiet and cool at mid-morning. A cloud appears in the east only to disintegrate. Towhees call from several directions as I finish my tea.
Downy, hairy, red-bellied and pileated: all the woodpeckers for miles around are suddenly drumming, one after another, as the scattered clouds turn orange on a crisp, nearly frosty morning.
The forsythia is fully in bloom, inconguous yellow against the brown woods—not unlike this apparition of a sun burning a hole through the gray clouds. Kinglets flit through the birches. The mourning dove falls silent.
Under gray skies, the old lilac is once again beginning to green up. The zig-zag flight of a phoebe gleaning breakfast out of thin air.
The sun rises behind the clouds, with the temperature right at freezing. Half of the daffodils lie face-down, the other half hold their heads high. Half the sky turns blue.
Weak sun through a sky more white than blue, where a plane is circling a thousand feet overhead. A tufted titmouse foraging on the thawed earth flies up into a spicebush to prize open a seed.