Still, with a flat-white sky. The throat-rattles of a crow chasing off a sharp-shinned hawk. The black birches fill with kinglets.
golden-crowned kinglet
11/17/2019
The usual pair of golden-crowned kinglets foraging nearby. I pish them into the cedar for a better view and get told off by a Carolina wren.
11/12/2019
Cold, but without the promised snow. Against the overcast sky, the silhouettes of what can only be kinglets flitting through the birches.
10/12/2017
Gold on gold: a kinglet’s crest among the birch leaves. Rust on rust: a chipmunk’s fur among rain-flattened tangles of stiltgrass.
10/24/2016
Over the wind, the twittering of chickadees trailing a flock of kinglets into the birches. Two brown creepers appear on adjacent trunks.
11/10/2012
Five golden-crowned kinglets forage in the crown of a birch. In a nearby barberry, a junco ticks sporadically like an uncommitted clock.
12/30/2011
A dusting of snow on every branch and twig. In the half-dark, kinglets bob in the top of a black birch—their high, thin calls.
10/21/2011
In the cold drizzle, a kinglet hovers over the faded lilac leaves, hawking prey too small to see. Then it, too, vanishes into the gloom.
9/23/2011
At the woods’ edge, the yellowest birch seethes with small birds—kinglets, I think. But by the time I fetch binoculars, the tree is still.
11/2/2010
Five below zero Celcius at sunrise. A single kinglet flutters in the birch—its whispery chirps. The fourth-quarter moon’s thin grin.
10/14/2010
The black locusts are beginning to yellow as the black birches beside them deepen to orange, alive with kinglets and glowing in the rain.
10/10/2010
The birches are astir with birds: migrant warblers, chickadees, and a kinglet darting from leaf to leaf, gold crown flashing among the gold.