Cool and damp at sunrise. A small cottontail grazes at the woods’ edge: a salad of tiny leaves. A gnatcatcher’s soft soliloquy.
sunrise
Cool and clear at sunrise. A gobbler trailed by two hens parades up into the forest, making a half-turn each time he opens the dark fan of his tail.
Sun glimmering through fog as wild turkeys whine and gobble, mourning doves moan, and a red-winged blackbird sings in the marsh.
The rambling old lilac is twice as green as it was yesterday, beginning to glow as the sun climbs out of some early-morning murk.
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 into thin cirrus. A few seconds of liquid joy: the song of winter wrens, two of them, darting low over the creek.
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.
Fog and scattered showers. The last few woodcock peents overlap with phoebes—two of them already, trying to out-sing each other.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.