Clear and cold. A few minutes before sunrise, with crows already noising about, a pair of screech owls start duetting up on the ridge, fierce high tremolos descending into tender trills.
American crow
Cold and clear with heavy frost. A small hawk hurtles over the house as crows call in the distance. The western ridge turns brick-red with sunrise.
The rising sun appears through new holes in the forest understory just after it tops the ridge. Crows and jays are in an uproar over a young peregrine falcon, who hangs around for a couple of hours, periodically giving chase to its most obnoxious persecutors until they all find better things to do elsewhere.
Hard, steady rain since the wee hours, but the crows still show up to yell from the top of the tallest tree at what would be sunrise.
Heavily overcast skies prolong the lingering darkness till well past sunrise, but eventually the duetting screech owls and the all-night migrants softly calling from the woods’ edge fall silent, the crows disperse, and the wren, one imagines, must be off busying himself with matters of great import.
Clear and cold. The high-pitched kik-kik-kik of a sharp-shinned hawk elicits a chirr from a red squirrel and a furous denunciation from a crow at the compost pit.
Sun in the treetops. A doe emerges from the woods to browse the road bank, followed by her two grown fawns already in their unspotted, gray-brown winter coats. Head up, her ears swivel toward a distant crow.
A rare low-humidity morning begins with crows heralding the sunrise and a screech owl trilling in the distance. Yellow clouds fade to white. A bluebird begins warbling as I open my laptop.
Dawn thunderstorm moving off by sunrise, which a single crow heralds from the dead top of a locust. The first hummingbird arrives at the jewelweed before the rain has quite stopped. Another storm rumbles in the west.
Clear, cool, and breezy—a week to the day after our last dry high. Six crows sit on dead branches atop the two tallest locust trees in the yard. One minute past sunrise, they look all around, shift on their perches, and take flight.
Clear and cold at sunrise. The dawn chorus is down to field sparrow, common yellowthroat and goldfinches. Distant crows. A truck jake-breaking through the gap. A red-eyed vireo starts up.
On a gorgeous morning, it would seem incongruous to read the news about last night’s elections were it not for the incessant begging of crow fledglings up in the woods, two of them, competing to see who can sound the most pitiable.
Mid-morning, and a small fly warms itself on the black keys of my laptop. The crow family makes its usual racket off in the sun-stuck woods. Vireos and a wood pewee reiterate their territorial claims.
Damp and overcast for the dawn chorus, which includes the accelerating buzz of a black-throated blue warbler, and a yellow-throated vireo slurring his syllables. The hidden sunrise gets noted, as usual, by a crow.