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The Morning Porch

Daily short takes from an Appalachian hollow

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eastern cottontail

November 9, 2025 by Dave Bonta

Thick fog. When the wren stops singing, there’s dead silence for several minutes until a nuthatch calls. From father away, the death-cry of a rabbit.

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Categories Plummer's Hollow Tags Carolina wren, eastern cottontail, fog, white-breasted nuthatch
January 28, 2025 by Dave Bonta

In the half-dark of dawn, the white noise of wind is made literal by flocks of snowflakes swirling this way and that. Rabbit tracks go under the house and do not reemerge.

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Categories Plummer's Hollow Tags dawn, eastern cottontail, snow, snowflakes, wind
June 11, 2023 by Dave Bonta

Rising late, I’m in time to see the last cottontail going back under the house for a mid-morning nap. Cuckoos call in the distance. Common yellowthroat. Wood pewee.

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Categories Plummer's Hollow Tags common yellowthroat, eastern cottontail, eastern wood pewee, yellow-billed cuckoo

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On This Day

  • August 15, 2025
    Half a moon alone in the sky. A silent catbird flies into the half-dead lilac. Off through the forest, blinding fragments of the sun.
  • August 15, 2024
    Cool and still, with sunlight at half strength due to atmospheric haze—smoke from Canada’s burning forests. A wood pewee’s bluesy melisma.
  • August 15, 2023
    Leaves glistening with last night’s rain. A distant raven. The puttering of a hummingbird’s small motor.
  • August 15, 2022
    Drizzle thickening now and then into proper rain. The bracken in my yard glows in all the colors of decline and fall.
  • August 15, 2021
    Ten minutes before first light, the first distant, barking dog. Ten minutes before that, a barred owl’s cackle.

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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