Crystal-clear and still. Two pileated woodpeckers a quarter mile apart are having a drum-off. The rising sun sneaks up behind a tree.
sunrise
March 27, 2023
Sunrise into thin cirrus. A few seconds of liquid joy: the song of winter wrens, two of them, darting low over the creek.
March 26, 2023
Robins have joined the dawn chorus to dramatic effect; the hollow’s echo chamber throbs with birdsong. The first vulture of the day soars past a pink-bellied cloud.
March 23, 2023
Fog and scattered showers. The last few woodcock peents overlap with phoebes—two of them already, trying to out-sing each other.
March 20, 2023
Clear and cold. All the while the sunrise seeps down from the treetops, a squirrel files away at a rock-hard black walnut shell to extract meat seasoned by months underground.
March 19, 2023
A dozen dead leaves circle the yard as the clouds’ bellies turn orange. A phoebe calls once, sotto voce, from a branch above the creek.
March 18, 2023
The sun guttering below a lid of utility-gray cloud illuminates a small flotilla of snowflakes. It’s quiet apart from one, highly excited wren.
March 16, 2023
Sunrise into slow-moving cirrus; the light dulls like the eyes of a dying fish. In the windless calm, the long gargle of an 18-wheeler descending an exit.
March 15, 2023
Clear and cold, with a bitter wind to remind me it’s actually March. I watch the sun through the corner of my eye as it climbs through the ridgetop trees.
March 10, 2023
Flurries in lieu of a sunrise; the ground is already white again. A faint, yellow-green wash on the rambling old lilac—buds are beginning to swell.
March 9, 2023
Crystal clear and quiet from moonset to sunrise and beyond. The sine wave of a pileated woodpecker’s flight through the trees, each widely spaced flap propelling it upward.
March 8, 2023
Moon low in the west, as bright as a searchlight. Two silent crows fly over the house. The clouds’ bellies begin to glow.
March 6, 2023
Cold and still, with an almost-mackerel sky that Vs of tundra swans keep crossing—their clarinet notes, their breast feathers golden with sunrise.
March 1, 2023
Fast-moving, yellow-bellied clouds stream up from the southeast, clearing to reveal a long bow of tundra swans arrowing north.