Sunrise somewhere between showers, cold and sodden, the sky flat-white like the eye of a dead fish. No flies for the flycatchers, no sun for the wren.
phoebe
March 29, 2025
A freakishly warm wind seasoned with rain. A red squirrel’s scold-call launches the dawn chorus: phoebe, wren, cardinal, white-throated sparrow. A turkey gobbles.
March 25, 2025
Dawn. A last glimpse of the moon through the clouds as the torrent of robin song is joined by a cardinal, a phoebe, the wren.
March 20, 2025
Thin, high clouds—enough to blur the edges of shadows. Whenever the robin pauses for breath, I can hear a phoebe calling up by the barn. Spring is here.
October 7, 2024
Breezy and cool at dawn. Migrants trade notes as they explore the forest edge: towhee, phoebe, thrush. A lost passenger jet comes roaring overhead.
September 11, 2024
Another gorgeous, cool morning. Two ravens fly over at sunrise, croaking. A phoebe in the distance is just audible under the usual cascade of wren song.
June 20, 2024
A cool beginning to another hot day. The chipping sparrow’s dry rattle. Phoebe and wood-pewee from either side of the woods’ edge like the citizens of neighboring countries comparing accents.
May 22, 2024
The sun finally clears the trees at 9:00. A bluebird and a phoebe call back and forth in the yard, an ovenbird and a red-eyed vireo talk over each other in the woods, and in the valley, traffic, a tractor, a train.
April 11, 2024
Dawn comes during a break in the rain, building from one lone cardinal to a phoebe singing contest to a mob of crows. From the pipe under the road, a winter wren’s soft cascade.
April 4, 2024
Thick fog brightening in the east. Over the roar of the creek, a phoebe’s small, inexhaustible engine.
March 30, 2024
Red sunrise. To the south, the moon has gone flat on one side so it resembles a giant ear for the first crow to yell into when it created the world. The chanting phoebe clearly has no inkling.
March 26, 2024
Red spreading from the clouds to the western ridge. Robin, cardinal, phoebe: the early-spring trio, joined by a downy woodpecker on percussion with a high-pitched dead limb.
March 15, 2024
A gray cloud ceiling brightens toward the horizon. A phoebe stridently announces himself to the echoey hillside and the daffodils trembling in the breeze.
September 22, 2023
Cool but not quite as clear, with a thin, high scrim of clouds and the incessant beeping of quarry trucks, to which a migrant phoebe briefly responds.