6:24. The cardinal sings a few times and falls silent. 6:26. The whippoorwill calls a few times and falls silent. 6:29. The Carolina wren starts up.
dawn
A cold and cloudy dawn. The thump and clatter of hooves, deer crashing through the underbrush—hounded not by a predator but the first stirrings of rut. A migrant thrush’s soft call.
A dawn too cold for crickets, and still except where a squirrel makes a branch tremble. From the top of a black locust, a hairy woodpecker’s nasal chirps.
A half moon hangs overhead, its light lost to the dawn. A bat makes one last circuit of the yard, where the white tops of snakeroot are beginning to show.
A desultory dawn chorus of one Carolina wren and a towhee. I consider baring an arm to stop the mosquitoes from whining in my ear.
Dawn passes too quickly; already the cardinal is attacking his image in the window. Three moth wings rest on the arm of my chair.
Dawn: a blurry moon just above the trees losing its glow. The wood thrush’s ethereal song gives way to a red-eyed vireo sounding like a wind-up bird, going at twice normal speed.
Fog at dawn, raucous with the calls of a whip-poor-will staking his claim to the woods’ edge, close enough that I can hear him clear his throat.
Dawn comes during a break in the rain, building from one lone cardinal to a phoebe singing contest to a mob of crows. From the pipe under the road, a winter wren’s soft cascade.
In the half-light, a Louisiana waterthrush’s jumble of notes. The sky is nearly clear. Peonies are raising red hands out of the earth.
Dark and overcast at dawn. The creek has subsided—a hubbub rather than a roar. The cardinal who roosts in the red cedar next to the house calls once at 6:03 and goes back to sleep.
The all-night rain doesn’t let up for dawn. The dim light spreads from the southeast, where the waning moon must be, to the east. It’s April. Fools and poets rejoice.
Clear and cold as the moon’s searchlight sinks through ridgetop trees. Dawn stains the east. The cardinal wakes up, full of cheer.
Red dawn with a moon like a searchlight sinking into the powerline cut. The cardinal debuts a new call with what sounds like a glottal stop in the middle: chee-er, chee-er.