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The Morning Porch

Daily short takes from an Appalachian hollow

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woodcock

April 1, 2023 by Dave Bonta

Rain and fog linger from a pre-dawn thunderstorm as the sky brightens. The nasal calls of woodcocks mingle with a torrent of robin song.

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Categories Plummer's Hollow Tags American robin, dawn, fog, rain, woodcock
March 23, 2023 by Dave Bonta

Fog and scattered showers. The last few woodcock peents overlap with phoebes—two of them already, trying to out-sing each other.

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Categories Plummer's Hollow Tags fog, phoebe, rain, sunrise, woodcock
March 16, 2016March 15, 2016 by Dave Bonta

At first light, off in the fog, the weird, nasal calls of timberdoodles. One launches into the air with a whistling of wings.

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Categories Plummer's Hollow Tags fog, killdeer, woodcock
March 30, 2015 by Dave Bonta

Cold with low rain clouds at dawn. Over the noise from I-99, the nasal mating calls of that shoreless shorebird, the American woodcock.

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Categories Plummer's Hollow Tags clouds, woodcock

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On This Day

  • June 7, 2025
    Rain at sunrise. A flower longhorn beetle takes refuge under the porch, landing beside my mug. The crash of a falling limb.
  • June 7, 2024
    A commotion of gray squirrels in the spicebush next to the springhouse, where one seems to be in estrus-induced discomfort, and five others are there to help out.
  • June 7, 2023
    Clear—or what passes for it these days—and cold. The black digger wasp I last saw at dusk hasn’t moved from her spot on the porch column.
  • June 7, 2022
    Overcast. Random knocks from an unseen woodpecker. A white-breasted nuthatch’s nervous call punctuates a wood pewee’s song.
  • June 7, 2021
    Gray sky gravid with bad weather. On either side of the road, the tall grass trembles: foraging chipmunks.

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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All works on this site by Dave Bonta are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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