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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

  • July 25, 2025
    A warm breeze abuzz with hummingbirds and mosquitoes. A red-eyed vireo sings a few notes and falls silent. Inside a hollow locust tree, something is beating.
  • July 25, 2024
    Cloudy and damp, with long intervals between bird calls. A small woodpecker’s improbably loud rattle from the black locusts sets off a pair of Carolina wrens.
  • July 25, 2023
    Sunrise thunderstorm: the sky darkening just when you least expect it, then the downpour and all the leaves of grass nodding like headbangers as the thunder booms.
  • July 25, 2022
    The sky never gets fully light before thunder starts to rumble. Now it’s getting dark again. The birds fall silent.
  • July 25, 2021
    The sun feels as if it has no business being out on such a quiet morning. A towhee sings a truncated version of his song: just “Your tea!”

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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