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Daily short takes from an Appalachian hollow

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common yellowthroat

April 27, 2011 by Dave Bonta

A song so familiar it takes several minutes to register that this is new, the first I’ve heard it since last fall: common yellowthroat.

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Categories Plummer's Hollow Tags common yellowthroat 8 Comments
June 15, 2010 by Dave Bonta

A male yellowthroat flies from perch to perch without singing. It occurs to me that most of the music in my life wasn’t made for human ears.

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Categories Plummer's Hollow Tags common yellowthroat
July 22, 2009 by Dave Bonta

Gray and misty. A common yellowthroat keeps caroling back to a Carolina wren, until I have trouble remembering which “witchedy” is which.

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Categories Plummer's Hollow Tags Carolina wren, common yellowthroat
June 17, 2009 by Dave Bonta

Breezy, overcast, a spit of rain—these reports never seem complete without the weather. The buzz of a hummingbird. A common yellowthroat.

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Categories Plummer's Hollow Tags catbird, common yellowthroat, ruby-throated hummingbird
July 6, 2008 by Dave Bonta

The yellowthroat’s witchedywitchedywitchedy woke me at dawn. Now he sits silent on a curved claw of dead elm, insouciant in his black mask.

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Categories Plummer's Hollow Tags common yellowthroat
June 27, 2008 by Dave Bonta

Another reason not to mow the lawn: a male common yellowthroat feeds a querulous fledgling in the tall grass directly in front of the porch.

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Categories Plummer's Hollow Tags common yellowthroat
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On This Day

  • August 28, 2025
    Cold and clear, autumnal weather continues, with a heavy inversion layer that makes the interstate sound as if it’s just above the barn. Dew drips from the roof.
  • August 28, 2024
    Warm and humid, with a sickle moon high overhead. I battle mosquitos in between reading about eastern equine encephalitis on my phone.
  • August 28, 2023
    Gray rain clouds thickening towards 8:00. It’s very still; long moments go by without a single bird call. A beetle finds its way to the butterfly weed.
  • August 28, 2021
    The fog slowly lifts, except where it’s been trapped by funnel spider webs. The cardinal’s cheer seems a bit misplaced.
  • August 28, 2016
    A warm morning, and all I hear are the birds of winter: chickadee, nuthatch, pileated woodpecker. A dead cranefly dangles from a spiderweb.

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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