Having risen late on the one sunny morning of the week, I watch a tiny, pale green grasshopper wander my trouser leg, its antennae sweeping the dark denim ahead. | Continue reading
Gloomy and damp, with a shimmer of mizzle. The distant boom of dynamite at the quarry. A catbird improvises a few melodic lines. A breeze springs up. | Continue reading
A break in the clouds allows a bit of sunrise to stain the treetops, where a noisy kestrel gets dive-bombed by a robin. A pair of black cherry trees are […] | Continue reading
After so many gray days, the clarity of the air and the quality of light moving through new leaves feel miraculous. A red-eyed vireo’s lyrical harangue. | Continue reading
Heavily overcast and cold. A redstart is calling from above the springhouse—a buoyant buzz—while a distant wood thrush makes me revisit my dreams. | Continue reading
An hour past sunrise, an opossum is out hunting earthworms pushed out of their burrows by the all-night rain. She keeps pausing to raise her snout and sniff the air […] | Continue reading
Steady rain. A gnatcatcher flutters to find breakfast on the undersides of leaves, then retreats to the shelter of the lilac to shake the water off. A chipmunk runs under […] | Continue reading
Cool and increasingly cloudy as the sun clears the treetops—a bright spot in the gray. A rose-breasted grosbeak sings. Chipmunk metronomes go in and out of sync. | Continue reading
A damp sunrise after thunderstorms in the night. Waves of scent from the lilac, whose blossoms are beginning to fade and droop. The nonstop chatter of goldfinches. | Continue reading
An hour before sunrise, the blood-curdling shrieks and snarls of a raccoon, accompanied by the piping of her terrified kits. A barred owl offers commentary from the woods’ edge. I […] | Continue reading
A green fog of leaves in fog. A pileated woodpecker‘s thunderous drum finds no echo. | Continue reading
Gloomy sunrise, with a cloud snagged on the treetops, leaking rain. A titmouse takes advantage of a lull in the chorus to hype his own claim. A tanager’s plucked string. | Continue reading
Gentle rain. The intense green of new leaves everywhere but inside the ring of fencing around a tulip tree that appeared in my yard during the pandemic like a blessing. […] | Continue reading
The quarry’s dull roar: weather is out of the east. Hemmed in by green, the tall hawthorn hoards its mountain of snow. | Continue reading
A warm breeze at sunrise. My reading is interrupted by an unfamiliar trill: a redheaded woodpecker in the dead crown of the tallest black locust. I watch through binoculars as […] | Continue reading
Cloudless at sunrise, with rain still clinging to the grass. Tree leaves are on average half open now, making the woods’ edge half screen, half wall. | Continue reading
The sun rose while I was watching the moon. Now there’s a black-throated blue warbler at the woods’ edge whispering its three-syllable song. | Continue reading
Night and day overlap as the moon rises through the trees, serenaded by a family of barred owls, while the first song sparrow and cardinal herald the dawn. Then the […] | Continue reading
Fog at dawn, raucous with the calls of a whip-poor-will staking his claim to the woods’ edge, close enough that I can hear him clear his throat. | Continue reading
Under a white sky, the rambling old white lilac is beginning to bloom. Half an hour past sunrise, the first, tentative raindrops on the roof. | Continue reading
Out before dawn, I find moonlight in my chair. A song sparrow sings one phrase, possibly without waking up. A quiet trickle from the spring. | Continue reading
Overcast and cold, with a red-bellied woodpecker’s ceaseless whinnying. The old crabapple tree is red and ready to open for sunshine and bees. | Continue reading
Waiting for the rising sun to emerge from the clouds, I read half a book. The sky is a crazy quilt, orange and gray and pale blue. The birds are […] | Continue reading
The sun climbs from clarity into murk. Feeling insufficiently caffeinated, I watch the tulip tree’s tall, green torch fade to chartreuse. | Continue reading
Five degrees below freezing and still. A red-winged blackbird calls from a sunlit treetop above the springhouse and its tiny cattail marsh. | Continue reading
It’s overcast and near freezing, but as soon as I step onto the porch, the worries that kept me awake half the night vanish. The woods’ edge is a gallery […] | Continue reading
Cool with a clearing sky at sunrise. A blue-headed vireo’s soliloquy. The smell of damp earth. | Continue reading
A heavy white sky giving few hints of sunrise. In the distance, the faint bells of a wood thrush. A field sparrow’s accelerating rush toward silence. | Continue reading
Just past sunrise, a vagrant red squirrel appears in the yard, given away at first by her nervous, jerky movements as she forages for breakfast, then the old-barn color as […] | Continue reading
The bridal wreath bush that persists in the shadow of the old lilac is in bloom—the only time of year I remember its existence. From just above it come the […] | Continue reading
In the last few minutes before the sun crests the ridge, ghosts lingering among the trees turn back into blossoming shadbush. A chickadee is singing his spring song. | Continue reading
A still morning after last night’s violent storms. The tulip trees have burst their buds—a pale green haze. A few high clouds in the east turn purple. | Continue reading
Still and crystal-clear at sunrise. A couple of whines from a hen turkey conjure up a gobble from the ridgetop. The blue-headed vireo’s soliloquy. | Continue reading
The trees still sway after their all-night rave with the wind. The tall serviceberry at the woods’ edge is in bloom: pale foam against heavy, gray clouds. | Continue reading
Wind throbs in the treetops; the birdcall app thinks it’s a drumming grouse. Juncos twitter from the lilac, which has just burst its buds—a green apparition against the brown woods. | Continue reading
Dawn comes during a break in the rain, building from one lone cardinal to a phoebe singing contest to a mob of crows. From the pipe under the road, a […] | Continue reading
Rainy and cool. An eastern towhee is urging me—according to the time-honored birders’ mnemonic—to drink my tea, while woodpeckers large and small bang their heads against the trees. | Continue reading
In the half-light, a Louisiana waterthrush’s jumble of notes. The sky is nearly clear. Peonies are raising red hands out of the earth. | Continue reading
From up in the field, a hen turkey’s plaintive rasp conjures up a tom—that tumble of notes. The briefest blaze of sun between the clouds. | Continue reading
Crystal-clear at sunrise. Every morning more yellow—daffodils, spicebush. Leftover from winter, the bone-white branches of tulip poplar that squirrels have stripped to line their dreys. | Continue reading
A spit of rain in my face at sunrise, despite the lack of clouds—classic April. It’s cold. The miniature daffodils have been blooming for a solid month. | Continue reading
Dark and overcast at dawn. The creek has subsided—a hubbub rather than a roar. The cardinal who roosts in the red cedar next to the house calls once at 6:03 […] | Continue reading
Thick fog brightening in the east. Over the roar of the creek, a phoebe’s small, inexhaustible engine. | Continue reading
In the pre-dawn darkness, nothing but the sounds of rain and water. A low rumbling comes from the hole in my yard that leads down to the stream just before […] | Continue reading
Rain. Every ditch runs with whitewater. Behind the bright forsythia, a gray wall of fog swallows the trees. Nevertheless, a wren. | Continue reading
The all-night rain doesn’t let up for dawn. The dim light spreads from the southeast, where the waning moon must be, to the east. It’s April. Fools and poets rejoice. | Continue reading
Sunrise past, the sky goes gray. The damp woods smell of earth and leaf-mold. The old lilac bristles with bright green buds. | Continue reading
Red sunrise. To the south, the moon has gone flat on one side so it resembles a giant ear for the first crow to yell into when it created the […] | Continue reading