In my left ear, the sound of traffic going through the gap. In my right, white-throated sparrow, nuthatch, raven, jay. It looks like rain.
white-throated sparrow
November 17, 2018
Where the stream fans out beside the springhouse, birds hop down the snowbanks and into the water to bathe: sparrows, juncos, Carolina wren.
October 24, 2018
Cold wind. A white-throated sparrow sings its plaintive, quavering song and falls silent. I sit in the reek of dogshit from my boot.
October 14, 2018
Cold and heavily overcast. A jay switches from his own call to red-tailed hawk, then chickadee. In the meadow, white-throated sparrows.
April 15, 2018
Under the sort of sky poets call sullen, a robin’s relentless bowl of cheer. Leave it to the white-throated sparrow to add a wistful note.
November 29, 2017
The hiss of the wind. Oak leaves scud above the treetops in one direction while juncos and sparrows move through the weeds in the other.
November 7, 2017
Mid-morning and the yard is seething with birds—chickadees, sparrows, juncos, nuthatches, titmice—foraging and singing despite the sleet.
October 15, 2017
Sunlight for the first time in days, flooding through new holes in the forest canopy. The wistful theme song of a white-throated sparrow.
March 16, 2017
Weak sun threading through the trees. The glint of microscopic flakes makes the air seem metallic. A white-throated sparrow’s wavering song.
February 27, 2017
Cold and still, with a bright smudge of sun. A white-throated sparrow joins a junco in the dried stiltgrass, burrowing into it like a vole.
November 30, 2016
I have to wipe the fog off my chair before I can sit. After a while, it begins to rain. In the dead meadow weeds, a commentary of sparrows.
November 11, 2016
A honeybee investigates my thermos mug, brushing my finger with her wings. The barberry bush trembles from all the sparrows in it.
October 29, 2016
Warm eddies mingle with the cold. A flock of sparrows moves through the meadow, singing, twittering, setting the goldenrod heads asway.
October 23, 2016
Cloudy and cold. The soft back-and-forth of sparrows flitting between woods and meadow. The distant keening of an ambulance.