Daily short takes from an Appalachian hollow
Overcast and cool. When I tire of feeding myself to the mosquitoes, I don a bug hat and go into the yard with my phone to identify whatever has been skeletonizing trees and shrubs: angle-lined prominent moth caterpillars on the bigtooth aspen, pinstriped in green but too hairy to be extra twigs, and dogwood sawfly larvae on the silky dogwoods, curled into fat white moons.
Heavily overcast and quiet, except for the steady trill of tree crickets and a distant vireo. A catbird rustles in the silky dogwood, gorging on the deep-blue drupes.
Cool and clear as a morning in October. A catbird fresh from his bath picks insects off dogwood leaves with a fussy chirp between each morsel.
In thin fog, the soft notes of juncos and white-throated sparrows taking their morning baths in the shelter of a dogwood beside the springhouse.
Cold weather has finally returned. Small birds are bathing in the stream despite the iron wind, shaking themselves dry in a dogwood bush.
Male cardinals bathe side-by-side in the stream, then resume chasing. A jay perches in a dogwood bush shaking the water from his wings.
Last night’s heavy frost retreats to the shade. By 10:30, sparrows are bathing in the stream, shaking themselves dry in the sunlit dogwood.
Yarrow, fleabane, silky dogwood… white is in style. But the cabbage white butterflies still prefer the purple remnants of dame’s-rocket.
From high overhead, the faint cries of swans. I scan the clear sky in vain. A blue jay drinks from a seep in the yard beside the dogwoods.
Open water in the ditch. Juncos fly down to drink then up to perch in the snow-laden branches of a dogwood, shaking themselves like dogs.
Now that the walnuts have all fallen, a squirrel deigns to pick one off the ground. The dogwood beside the stream pullulates with sparrows.
The hornets stream in and out of their hole in the garden, departing to the south, returning from the east. A towhee calling in the dogwood.
There must be open water in the ditch: jay- and sparrow-shaped silhouettes are going up and down the dogwood’s laddered branches.
The house finch tries to fit everything into a five-second burst of song, purple among the purple twigs of silky dogwood.