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The Morning Porch

Daily short takes from an Appalachian hollow

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rose-breasted grosbeak

May 9, 2024 by Dave Bonta

Cool and increasingly cloudy as the sun clears the treetops—a bright spot in the gray. A rose-breasted grosbeak sings. Chipmunk metronomes go in and out of sync.

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Categories Plummer's Hollow Tags chipmunks, clouds, rose-breasted grosbeak
May 1, 2022 by Dave Bonta

After insomnia, watching the rain come in and whatever brightness the morning might’ve had dwindling to just rose-breasted grosbeak song.

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Categories Plummer's Hollow Tags rain, rose-breasted grosbeak
April 29, 2022 by Dave Bonta

Sun through a thin milk of clouds. A lull in birdsong, punctuated by a didactic ovenbird and the rose-breasted grosbeak’s brilliant warble.

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Categories Plummer's Hollow Tags clouds, ovenbird, rose-breasted grosbeak
May 30, 2010 by Dave Bonta

A rose-breasted grosbeak flutters up from the creek singing clear, cool notes. A cranefly drifts through a sunbeam, carrying its legs.

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Categories Plummer's Hollow Tags cranefly, rose-breasted grosbeak, stream

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On This Day

  • September 27, 2025
    Overcast but not gloomy. Above the usual yammering of a red-bellied woodpecker, I catch a few phrases of warbler buzz: cerulean, I think.
  • September 27, 2024
    Fog that lasts for hours, blurring the lines between night and day, and between sky and ground for night-flying migrants now foraging all along the woods’ edge—a cloud full of food.
  • September 27, 2023
    An hour past sunrise and the sky is brightening. A red-bellied woodpecker makes anxious chirps, prompting a flicker to respond. A tree drops a dead limb into last year’s leaves.
  • September 27, 2022
    Rising late to find the sun already in the trees and the air redolent of autumn. Silhouettes of birds pass as quietly as thoughts through the canopy.
  • September 27, 2021
    My first day on earth without a father. It takes me ten minutes to notice the sky—cloudless blue. The laboring engine of a distant plane.

See all...

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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