Sun in the treetops as the tanager revisits his hit song, no longer in heavy rotation. A firefly sails past with his light off.
scarlet tanager
After a downpour at dawn, the sky brightens, then darkens again. The aspen and tulip tree saplings in my yard take turns trembling in the breeze. The tanager sings.
Rain subsiding into mizzle by mid-morning. The distant thunder of a pileated woodpecker. A scarlet tanager sings quietly from the small trees below my mother’s sitting room.
Georgeous and cool. I stay out until the sun clears the trees, letting the birdsong and the poems I’m reading intermingle in my ear: stanza after stanza of red-eyed vireo, tanager enjambment, the redstart’s end-stopped line.
Birds still singing in a downpour: scarlet tanager, common yellowthroat, Acadian flycatcher, great-crested flycatcher… Fronds of bracken tremble as if readying for flight.
Cold and mostly clear. Barely audible above the red-eyed vireos and scarlet tanager, the minor-key call of a titmouse—that wintry sound.
Listening for thunder, I hear warblers, flycatchers, vireos, a tanager. The rumble of a freight train. And finally, as I’m writing this, some thunder, off to the east.
Two hours past sunrise, a scarlet tanager sings unchallenged from a tree in the yard. The sunlight fades in and out. A mourning dove calls in the distance.
Fog lifts to reveal blue sky, the sun in the treetops. A scarlet tanager hurtles past the porch with a second in close pursuit. The morning’s first itch prickles the back of my hand.
Gloomy sunrise, with a cloud snagged on the treetops, leaking rain. A titmouse takes advantage of a lull in the chorus to hype his own claim. A tanager’s plucked string.
Still overcast, but with a bit of a breeze. From the woods’ edge, the chick-burr call of a scarlet tanager. A chipmunk’s incessant metronome.
Windy and cool. The pale undersides of leaves turning in unison like shoals of fish. A robin and a tanager trading off.
Catbird and tanager trading licks. For half a minute, a vagrant sunbeam sets one of the two mullein stalks aglow.
On a dark and cloudy morning, the green of the woods’ edge seems even more intense. The scarlet tanager sounds hoarse with longing.