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The Morning Porch

Daily short takes from an Appalachian hollow

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white-throated sparrow

April 12, 2011 by Dave Bonta

The red maple blossoms are open at last, puffs of red anthers or orange pollen. A white-throated sparrow sings without stopping in the rain.

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Categories Plummer's Hollow Tags rain, red maple, white-throated sparrow 5 Comments
February 6, 2011 by Dave Bonta

There must be open water in the ditch: jay- and sparrow-shaped silhouettes are going up and down the dogwood’s laddered branches.

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Categories Plummer's Hollow Tags blue jays, juncos, silky dogwood, tree sparrow, white-throated sparrow 2 Comments
November 26, 2009 by Dave Bonta

As if giving thanks, the thin, wavering call of a white-throated sparrow. The dawn sky half-cloud, half-clear. A distant owl.

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Categories Plummer's Hollow Tags great-horned owl, white-throated sparrow
November 24, 2009 by Dave Bonta

Rain and fog with raven: silent, just above the treetops. White-throated sparrows and a freight train whistling at the same pitch.

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Categories Plummer's Hollow Tags fog, raven, train, white-throated sparrow
November 13, 2007 by Dave Bonta

Rain drumming on the roof. A single bar of white-throated sparrow song, and then the factory whistle dividing the dawn from the day.

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Categories Plummer's Hollow Tags factory whistle, rain, white-throated sparrow
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On This Day

  • February 22, 2025
    The sun! A robin answers the Carolina wren as a pileated woodpecker hammers away at a hollow black walnut tree.
  • February 22, 2024
    Overcast at sunrise, but the cloud lid lifts enough for the sun to glimmer through when it crests the ridge. Saturday’s snow is looking threadbare—a…
  • February 22, 2023
    Just enough thinning of clouds for a classic, red-in-the-morning wash of mauve in the east, where quarry trucks are loud with their first loads.
  • February 22, 2022
    Gray with occasional showers. Distant crows. The face that I can’t unsee in the big red maple trunk with its expression of perpetual dismay.
  • February 22, 2021
    Snowstorm. The hammer-blows of a pileated woodpecker on what must be a very hollow dead tree. How annoyed I’d be if it were a human…

See all...

Related book

Cover of Ice Mountain with a linocut of a big ridgetop tree.

What I do after I sit on the porch. One winter and spring's daily walks distilled into short poems with linocut illustrations by Beth Adams.

Header image: detail from Paper Garden by Clive Hicks-Jenkins (used by permission)

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