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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

  • September 19, 2025
    Sun through thin cirrus. Half an hour of a hawk hunting the yellow woods and I have yet to catch a glimpse, tracking its movement only by squirrel and jay scold-calls.
  • September 19, 2024
    8:00 o’clock church bells and the fog has nearly all lifted. A nuthatch calls down by the stream, soon joined by chickadees. From my mother’s house, the measured voices of NPR.
  • September 19, 2023
    Another cool and quiet autumn morning. The snakeroot has faded to a blowsy brown just as the goldenrod reaches its pinnacle of yellow.
  • September 19, 2022
    Dawn. The last katydid falls silent. The fourth-quarter moon, curled up like a dried fish, disappears into a cloud.
  • September 19, 2021
    5:30. A pair of barred owls exchange queries as the sky begins to brighten. A screech owl’s quaver. Sudden loud wingbeats in the meadow.

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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