I move around to the shady side of the house. Different birds here: oriole high in a walnut tree, towhee tapping at the dining room window.
towhee
Amid the heavy raindrops, the lighter ghosts of just-melted snowflakes. Treetops sway this way and that. The towhee goes on calling.
Robin song echoes through the fog. My neighbor drives past on the tractor. In the wake of its rumble, a towhee’s eponymous call.
Hard, steady rain—yet somehow certain small, filmy-winged insects still manage to fly. From the woods’ edge, a towhee’s eponymous call.
The train’s horn is full of Monday. Migrating towhees compare notes at the edge of the woods. A blue wound closing in the clouds.
Overcast and cool. I’m outside for an hour and there’s no point at which something—chipmunk, squirrel, towhee, siren—isn’t signalling alarm.
A few, wandering flakes slowly build into a snow squall. From my parents’ back porch, the “towhee” call of a towhee that hasn’t gone south.
Overcast. A towhee keeps singing the first two notes of his three-note song. Propped on the railing, my feet appear to anchor a spiderweb.
Cold air, warm sun. Two male towhees tweet at each other in the lilac. The old crabapple is coming into bloom, as shockingly pink as ever.
Sun and wind conspire against the fresh, wet snow clinging to every twig. A towhee calls in the midst of his labors to uncover the ground.
Flies and butterflies, gnats and gnatcatchers, blue-headed vireo, paper wasp. The towhee in the lilac bush starts his song with a stutter.
The lilac trembles from without and within: rain hammers the leaves while birds jockey for shelter under them—towhee, cardinal, wren.
A scattering of white in my overgrown garden: soapwort, bindweed, fleabane, snakeroot. The sky brightens. A towhee calls from the lilac.
Cold winds stir the leaves on the forest floor in lieu of anything better. A towhee seeks the shelter of the lilac for her own rummaging.