Cold, but no frost. A hummingbird just after sunrise buzzes up to a dame’s-rocket blossom, turns and flies off. The sun gathers strength in the treetops.
sunrise
Breezy and cold, which the sun rising through clouds and half-leafed-out trees does little to abate. But when it emerges fully, I blink into a glisten of raindrops from last night’s showers winking back.
A couple degrees above freezing—the first clear morning in days. The sun blazing through the still mostly leafless oaks illuminates the dust on my glasses.
Damp and overcast for the dawn chorus, which includes the accelerating buzz of a black-throated blue warbler, and a yellow-throated vireo slurring his syllables. The hidden sunrise gets noted, as usual, by a crow.
A flaming pink sky subsides into orange, then gray. A scattering of raindrops. A red squirrel follows a chipping sparrow’s rattle with one of its own.
Clear at sunrise, the western ridge brick-red above a meadow full of fog. Sound is out of the east, so field sparrows are answered by quarry truck beepers, and a pileated woodpecker by the grinding of rocks.
White-throated sparrows sing back at forth at sunrise—so much less intense than the song battle between phoebes at first light. A silent crow heads toward the compost pile.
A crescent moon at dawn through trees on the cusp of leaf-out—possibly my last such view until October. It remains the only scrap of white in the sky as the sun’s first gleam tops the ridge.
Downy, hairy, red-bellied and pileated: all the woodpeckers for miles around are suddenly drumming, one after another, as the scattered clouds turn orange on a crisp, nearly frosty morning.
Thick fog at dawn, full of robin song and phoebe calls. Sunrise is signalled by little more than the growing thunder of pileated woodpeckers.
The sun rises behind the clouds, with the temperature right at freezing. Half of the daffodils lie face-down, the other half hold their heads high. Half the sky turns blue.
Cold and still. Sunlit stripes brighten between the trees as the songbird chorus dwindles to one energetic song sparrow in a spicebush next to the springhouse.
Equinox. I make it out onto the porch just as the sun peeks over the ridge. Phoebes are calling. From the top of a walnut tree, the brown-headed cowbird’s liquid lisp.
Sunrise sung in by song sparrows. I peer at red clouds through a fence of dripping icicles from yesterday’s snow.