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.
white-throated sparrow
A half inch of windblown powder atop yesterday’s couple inches of wet snow. A white-throated sparrow foraging on the lee side of the springhouse pauses to sing.
Cold and heavily overcast, with an inversion layer bringing the sounds of tires singing on the interstate, white-throated sparrows awakening in the meadow, and the clink of tin cans against birdfeeders from up at the other house, my mother clearing her throat.
Cold and still. A sky etched with faintly pink contrails. The song sparrows sing in fragments, while the white-throated sparrows merely chirp.
Sunrise delayed for a few minutes by a low bank of clouds. A gray squirrel emerges from its nest high in a black cherry and dashes down the newly exposed trunk. A robin adds a few tut-tuts to the chorus of white-throated sparrows.
Clear and still at dawn. As the last stars fade, the first sparrows begin to chirp. A crow alights on the tallest locust and begins to yell.
Heavily overcast at sunrise, signaled only by an upsurge in birdsong from dozens of white-throated sparrows, the Carolina wren, and a screech owl quavering in the pines.
Wind and rain at dawn. Half an hour before sunrise, a great twittering erupts from the meadow as hundreds of white-throated sparrows, sheltering deep in the goldenrod, begin to awaken.
Cold and still at dawn, with pink clouds emerging from the engines of a jet. A white-throated sparrow pipes up. Something on four feet runs off through the deepening leaf duff.
Sunrise brings birdsong: a Tennesee warbler’s blur of high notes answered by a towhee’s interrogatory tweet, and a white-throated sparrow’s “Oh, sweet Canada” giving way to the reedy whistles of cedar waxwings, tut-tutting robins, and a winter wren’s liquid braid.
A smear of sun, strong enough to cast thin shadows. Four white-throated sparrows trade variations of the same song like old-time fiddlers, trying slightly different arrangements, switching keys.
Damp gloom suffused with white-throated sparrow song, high and thin and tremulous, amid bright splashes of yellow: daffodils, forsythia, spicebush.
A freakishly warm wind seasoned with rain. A red squirrel’s scold-call launches the dawn chorus: phoebe, wren, cardinal, white-throated sparrow. A turkey gobbles.
A red dawn. The talking drums of pileated woodpeckers: one bass, one snare. A white-throated sparrow falters half-way through his song.