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Daily short takes from an Appalachian hollow

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eastern wood pewee

September 12, 2025July 24, 2012 by Dave Bonta

Six times in a row, the wood pewee chimes in right after the field sparrow. Don’t tell me birds don’t sing in part for the pleasure of it.

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Categories Plummer's Hollow Tags eastern wood pewee, field sparrow
September 12, 2025August 11, 2011 by Dave Bonta

Crystal-clear at sunrise: I’m aware of every smudge and scratch on my glasses. A wood pewee’s call reduced to a single, interrogatory note.

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Categories Plummer's Hollow Tags eastern wood pewee 3 Comments
September 12, 2025May 19, 2011 by Dave Bonta

Phoebe in the barnyard, pewee in the woods. What is it about cleared land that turns a lilting refrain into a burden, a shrill work song?

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Categories Plummer's Hollow Tags eastern wood pewee, phoebe 3 Comments
September 12, 2025August 6, 2010 by Dave Bonta

A wood pewee snaps an insect out of the air, lands and sings, his mournful notes the only thing audible over my uncle’s banjo.

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Categories Plummer's Hollow Tags banjo, eastern wood pewee 1 Comment
September 12, 2025May 15, 2010 by Dave Bonta

From the luminous green wall of the woods, a pewee calls. Maple keys come spinning, take the place of yesterday’s hailstones on the porch.

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Categories Plummer's Hollow Tags eastern wood pewee, hail, red maple
September 12, 2025August 14, 2009 by Dave Bonta

Thin fog. Now that the phoebes have left, their shy cousins the pewees have come out of the woods, and herald each sunrise in a slow drawl.

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Categories Plummer's Hollow Tags eastern wood pewee, fog, phoebe, sunrise
September 12, 2025June 19, 2009 by Dave Bonta

Another dark morning. The wood pewee makes a rare visit to the edge of the yard, sings one, sad note, and snaps a brown moth out of the air.

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Categories Plummer's Hollow Tags eastern wood pewee, moths 1 Comment
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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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