Overcast with a soundscape ranging from the sublime to the ridiculous: hermit thrush, tom turkey, a gnat mistaking my ear for a flower.
gnats
February 11, 2022
Crystal-clear. As the temperature climbs and the snowpack softens, the sun’s glare softens a little, too. A large winter gnat sails past.
June 24, 2021
Gnats backlit by the sun fly back and forth, reversing direction without slowing down even the slightest. The kak-kak-kak of a Cooper’s hawk.
April 5, 2021
Lust is in the air: a turkey gobbling in the field, a Cooper’s hawk calling in the woods, and right in front of me, a sunlit cloud of lekking gnats.
October 22, 2020
Clear and still. The sun clearing the ridgetop blazes through a new hole in the wall of leaves, lighting up a column of pogoing gnats.
March 28, 2019
Gnats are flying, and I think about the first insects, 340 million years before flowers—an alien earth preserved in these very hills.
September 28, 2017
The air’s so clear I can see gnats 100 feet away—bright motes wandering among the trees. Dead leaves crowd together at the end of the porch.
April 9, 2017
Bright and still. Two dozen gnats form a cloud of Brownian motion, rising and falling above a fixed point—some stone or blade of grass.
March 8, 2017
Filmy-winged gnats are blown past the porch, pale as snowflakes in the strong sun. Overhead, the fierce cries of ravens playing in the wind.
September 19, 2016
A new bloom of gnats—I saw them swarming by the back door—and the yard is full of fall warblers, foraging with the chickadees and titmice.
September 14, 2016
When I finally pay attention, what do I see? Just gnats orbiting an apparently arbitrary point in the middle of the yard. Just their wings.
July 20, 2016
High in the trees, a small cloud of gnats yoyoing up and down, backlit by the sun, while an itch grows on my hand where a mosquito drills.
July 13, 2015
Backlit by the sun against the dark woods, a swarm of lekking gnats, their Brownian motion now faster, now slower. An annual cicada’s whine.
May 25, 2015
A warm morning. The yard is filled with the bright wings of insects drifting up and down, back and forth against the dark woods.