With birds, a cold and overcast day isn’t gloomy. Their bright chirps and taps. The flashes of white when slate-colored juncos take wing.
juncos
Wednesday November 13, 2019
Juncos’ soft whistles. A white-throated sparrow’s melancholy song. The joyful shrieks of our neighbors’ four-year-old grandchildren.
Monday February 04, 2019
The snow has gone slushy, turning the hollow from a soundproof room into an echo chamber. Over the traffic noise, a junco’s cadenza.
Monday January 21, 2019
The wind has died; it’s zero. Through my balaclava and hood I can hear the excited chirps of juncos on the plowed road foraging for grit.
Saturday January 19, 2019
An almost unearthly calm, punctuated as ever by birds: woodpeckers, counter-singing wrens, a flock of juncos drinking from the dark stream.
Saturday November 24, 2018
The trees are turning silver and beginning to droop with the weight of freezing rain. A few juncos, undaunted, are bathing in the stream.
Saturday November 17, 2018
Where the stream fans out beside the springhouse, birds hop down the snowbanks and into the water to bathe: sparrows, juncos, Carolina wren.
Monday April 02, 2018
Five inches of wet snow like an April Fool’s prank that came a few hours late. The juncos at the bird feeder can twitter about nothing else.
Wednesday March 14, 2018
Small flakes sting my cheek; ice-bound trees squeak and groan. From the feeder up at my parents’ house, the happy chatter of snowbirds.
Monday March 12, 2018
Cold and gloomy, but the yard seethes with birds: juncos, cardinals, wren. A hundred yards away, a hawk sits on a limb, bedeviled by crows.