A warm breeze at sunrise. My reading is interrupted by an unfamiliar trill: a redheaded woodpecker in the dead crown of the tallest black locust. I watch through binoculars as he works over the tree and himself, probing under bark one moment and under his wing the next.
sunrise
Cloudless at sunrise, with rain still clinging to the grass. Tree leaves are on average half open now, making the woods’ edge half screen, half wall.
The sun rose while I was watching the moon. Now there’s a black-throated blue warbler at the woods’ edge whispering its three-syllable song.
The sun climbs from clarity into murk. Feeling insufficiently caffeinated, I watch the tulip tree’s tall, green torch fade to chartreuse.
Cool with a clearing sky at sunrise. A blue-headed vireo’s soliloquy. The smell of damp earth.
In the last few minutes before the sun crests the ridge, ghosts lingering among the trees turn back into blossoming shadbush. A chickadee is singing his spring song.
A still morning after last night’s violent storms. The tulip trees have burst their buds—a pale green haze. A few high clouds in the east turn purple.
Still and crystal-clear at sunrise. A couple of whines from a hen turkey conjure up a gobble from the ridgetop. The blue-headed vireo’s soliloquy.
Crystal-clear at sunrise. Every morning more yellow—daffodils, spicebush. Leftover from winter, the bone-white branches of tulip poplar that squirrels have stripped to line their dreys.
A spit of rain in my face at sunrise, despite the lack of clouds—classic April. It’s cold. The miniature daffodils have been blooming for a solid month.
Red sunrise. To the south, the moon has gone flat on one side so it resembles a giant ear for the first crow to yell into when it created the world. The chanting phoebe clearly has no inkling.
A goldfinch foraging alone in the crown of a birch continues to warble, intonation rising and falling as if still in conversation with the flock. The sun muscles up through the ridgetop trees.
The briefest opening in the clouds for sunrise. The first brown thrasher drops by to sing a few bars. Then the squeaky wheels of goldfinches, converging on my mother’s feeders.
Red spreading from the clouds to the western ridge. Robin, cardinal, phoebe: the early-spring trio, joined by a downy woodpecker on percussion with a high-pitched dead limb.