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Daily short takes from an Appalachian hollow

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yellow-bellied sapsucker

October 6, 2023 by Dave Bonta

Heavily overcast—what the weather app calls “light rain”—with a crow yelling in the distance and a yellow-bellied sapsucker mewing like a kitten.

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Categories Plummer's Hollow Tags American crow, clouds, yellow-bellied sapsucker
June 15, 2022 by Dave Bonta

The sun clears the trees sooner than seems possible, and the gnatcatcher’s extreme excitement is not a good sign. A sapsucker calls.

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Categories Plummer's Hollow Tags blue-gray gnatcatcher, yellow-bellied sapsucker
April 10, 2021 by Dave Bonta

Overcast with 100% chance of yellow: daffodils, forsythia, spicebush. A yellow-bellied sapsucker looking all tapped out.

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Categories Plummer's Hollow Tags daffodils, forsythia, spicebush, yellow-bellied sapsucker 1 Comment

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On This Day

  • September 9, 2025
    Another cold sunrise. A distant Carolina wren song prompts the wren roosting atop my heating oil tank to come flying out singing and land in the bracken.
  • September 9, 2024
    A cold and cloudy dawn. The thump and clatter of hooves, deer crashing through the underbrush—hounded not by a predator but the first stirrings of rut. A migrant thrush’s soft call.
  • September 9, 2023
    A whippoorwill interrupted by a screech owl falls silent after three attempts to steal back the stage. When the owl falls silent, a peeper calls.
  • September 9, 2022
    Thick fog slowly infused with sunlight. A squirrel drops pieces of black walnut shell into the dew-soaked weeds.
  • September 9, 2021
    Autumn comes from the ground up: stiltgrass stems reddening as bracken fronds bronze, while funnel spiderwebs snag the fog.

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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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