I am mentally marking walnut saplings for removal when they fill with migrants: yellow-rumped and palm warbler, ruby-crowned kinglet.
ruby-crowned kinglet
10/23/2018
A swarm of maple helicopters. I sneeze and a wren begins to sing. A kinglet rotates in time to the music. We’re in this dance together.
4/24/2018
Kinglets drop down out of the trees to join the gnatcatchers hawking insects in the yard. They sing, feint, flash eponymous ruby crowns.
10/1/2015
In the green and yellow woods, here and there a red branch. But the kinglets in the birches hide their ruby crowns under olive-green shocks.
9/28/2015
As leaves begin to flutter in the rain, I notice the small birds fluttering underneath them, like a flash mob that was there all along.
4/20/2011
Where the moon had glowed through ground fog at 4:00, now the sun glimmers. Four ruby-crowned kinglets flutter in and out of the lilac.
4/4/2011
Kinglets move through the birches. I think of their statelets: hidden expandable nests, clutch that weighs as much as the bird that laid it.
9/28/2010
How does the poison ivy know to turn the same salmon as the red maple it has infiltrated? A phoebe chases a kinglet from the roadside weeds.