A crow lands in a treetop and keeps flapping its wings, as if bathing in the falling snow. As I watch, a friend watches me, making a sketch.
American crow
Overcast, with a smell of burning plastic in the air. Half-way up the ridge, two crows move about in the treetops without making a sound.
Fire sirens. A wren’s burble. In a tree at the woods’ edge, two crows jeering a raven fall silent when it flies right over their heads.
Melting snow drips onto the porch roof. A crow lands at the top of a locust, the tallest soapbox around for his predictable denunciations.
A brown creeper ascends the trunk of a walnut tree, its jerky scuttling more insect-like than avian. Up on the ridge, a furious mob of crows.
By 11:00, the freezing rain has stopped and the rain of melting ice is underway—the woods are a-rattle with it. A crow won’t stop yelling.
After weeks of near-absence, crows call and quarrel in all directions. It must be the gut piles, venison viscera festering among the leaves.
Four crows around the houses are voicing loud displeasure at something or other. I hear bemusement in the croak of a raven high overhead.
cricket cricket cricket cricket cricket cricket cricket cricket cricket cricket cricket cricket CROW CROW CROW cricket cricket cricket crick
Cold and overcast. Up above the blossoming hawthorn, three crows walk back and forth on the forest floor as if searching for a lost trinket.
The green blush deepens on the hillside; shining motes of pollen speckle my laptop screen. A crow flaps up from the black currant bushes.
An old strand of caterpillar silk at the wood’s edge shimmers in the sun. A crow keeps saying something urgent in four syllables.
Frost has silvered the grass where a rabbit grazes, one hop away from a spreading patch of sun. When a crow flies over he flattens his ears.
The sun glints off periwinkle leaves in the yard where snow has just melted. All sounds come from a great distance: crow, woodpecker, train.