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The Morning Porch

Daily short takes from an Appalachian hollow

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wood frogs

March 25, 2016 by Dave Bonta

One wood frog still calls in the marshy corner of the field, late for the orgy. Under the porch railing, the first, tiny spiders of spring.

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Categories Plummer's Hollow Tags spiders, wood frogs
March 16, 2016March 13, 2016 by Dave Bonta

Rain. In the marshy corner of the field, the duck-like calls of wood frogs, just up from their cryogenic sleep and already fully aroused.

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Categories Plummer's Hollow Tags killdeer, rain, wood frogs
April 11, 2014 by Dave Bonta

The last few wood frogs still croaking down in the marsh give way to spring peepers, who soon fall silent in turn. Then the patter of rain.

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Categories Plummer's Hollow Tags rain, spring peeper, wood frogs
April 7, 2013 by Dave Bonta

A warm morning. When the sun goes in, the birds at last grow quiet, and I can hear wood frogs calling down in the boggy corner of the field.

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Categories Plummer's Hollow Tags wood frogs 1 Comment
April 5, 2008 by Dave Bonta

Mid-morning: overcast, 36°F, but the wood frogs are making a ruckus in their eyedropper of a pond. Yellow buds swell on the French lilac.

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Categories Plummer's Hollow Tags lilac, wood frogs

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On This Day

  • May 22, 2025
    Birds still singing in a downpour: scarlet tanager, common yellowthroat, Acadian flycatcher, great-crested flycatcher… Fronds of bracken tremble as if readying for flight.
  • May 22, 2024
    The sun finally clears the trees at 9:00. A bluebird and a phoebe call back and forth in the yard, an ovenbird and a red-eyed vireo talk over each other in the woods, and in the valley, traffic, a tractor, a train.
  • May 22, 2023
    A few minutes past sunrise, from the still-deep shadows under the trees, the song of a vagrant Swainson’s thrush, hoarse but ethereal, rising in pitch like a rhetorical question.
  • May 22, 2022
    The humid air is full of insects, filmy wings shining in the sun. In the herb garden, yellow eyes with white lashes: daisy fleabane in bloom.
  • May 22, 2021
    The black cherry blossoms are already fading, and the sun is going from dandelion-yellow to dandelion seedhead-white. Black-billed cuckoo.

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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