Another Morning in Paradise

12 June 2025: Hurricane Hill (1,100 feet), White River Junction, Vermont

4:08 a.m. Awoke to robins crooning in the maples. Phoebe nesting in the garage, still in the shade, tongue-tied and motionless as a barnacle.

5:02 a.m. (five minutes before sunrise). 64 degrees, wind Southwest five miles per hour, gusting to twelve; holds down mosquitoes. Aspen leaves, like flowing water, a constant sound that presides over a small portion of the road, rivulets of agitated leaves. Elsewhere, an aspen background accompanies an ensemble of energetic songbirds. Pastel peach across the sky, east to west, brushstrokes of color. A line of high, round, purplish clouds scuds east. Sun, a shade of red-eft orange not yet recognized by Crayola, screened by a tissue-thin mist, holds its color high into the sky, turning the purple flowers of a rhododendron lucent. Inside the rhododendron, a catbird gives voice to a wall of flowers the size of softballs.

First dragonfly of the year. Tiger swallowtails, yolk yellow, flit along the roadside, pollinating raspberries, cherries, and phlox.

Chipmunk in a stonewall, clucks ... the sound of indigestion.

Among the Birds: Thirty-five species: eight warblers (parula, ovenbird, black and white, black-throated green, yellow, yellowthroat, chestnut-sided, blackburnian), three vireos (red-eyed—no surprise here or anywhere else—blue-headed, warbling), two flycatchers (great crested, eastern phoebe), two corvids (blue jay noisy and crows silent; raven absent), one raptor (red-shouldered hawk—heard but not seen), one woodpecker (yellow-bellied sapsucker, a dithering percussionist). Mourning dove. The usual suspects: chickadees, titmice, nuthatches (both), three sparrows (chipping, song, junco), and two finches (purple, house). Cedar waxwing, brown creeper, and hermit thrush, the sweetest voice on the Hill. Ruby-throated hummingbird, throat on fire, bill a remarkable tool with remarkable adaptations: a jousting weapon, a spongy straw, a tweezer, an instrument of pollination and thermoregulation.

Northern house wren, much noise from so small a bird. Looks like a knot on a loop of an electric line. Dark-eyed junco flies by with a bill full of aspen fluff, nest lining ... and soft bedding for tiny eggs. American goldfinches, colors in agreement with swallowtails, undulate over the butterflies, dispensing songs.

Department of Persistence: 5:20 a.m.: Indigo bunting, a plump bird of hedgerows, wood margins, and blackberry tangles, on the tippy-tip of a spruce. Full of verve. He couldn't be higher. Issues hurried couplets, warbly notes (with variable transliterations: fire-fire, where-where, here-here; zay-zay, zreet-zreet, zeah-zeah; sweet-sweet, where-where, here-here, set-it, see-it). Puts his heart into his work. Arthur Cleveland Bent, author of the twenty-one-volume Life Histories of North American Birds (published between 1910 and 1968), wrote, "The remarkable thing about this is that the rhythm [of the indigo bunting's song] is exactly that of a well-known human jingle, Bean porridge hot, bean porridge cold. Bean porridge in the pot, nine days old."

I can't say I hear the "bean diddy," ... but the indigo bunting is one energetic songbird. Turns head while singing. Realigns several feathers under each wing. Resumes singing. Repeats the process several more times, always turns head mid-song. Prominently colored (shades of turquoise, ultramarine, purple) and prominently perched. Even the bill is pale blue. Flies to the electric line (wren bolts) and resumes singing.

Indigo bunting sings all day, though much more at dawn, all summer. Two hundred or more times an hour at sunrise. Sixty or fewer times an hour later in the afternoon. "Throws his notes out for all he's worth," wrote another mid-twentieth-century naturalist. On that, I can agree.

Somewhere in the shade of a brier patch, a dun-color female assesses the male's output and quantifies his couplets. Appraises his color. Eventually, she makes a life-altering decision. If she prefers his territory over the neighbor's, they mate—a quick and oft-repeated union. Then, she's more or less on her own. She builds the nest. Incubates. Feeds the chicks. He might (or might not) help feed the fledglings ... but she can't count on him for much more than advantageous property and vigorous territorial defense ... a system in place for several million years.

In the sexually dimorphic world of indigo buntings, color and song mean everything. The ultramarine males arrive first. The brightest male secures the best territory. If she likes what she sees (and hears), there's a union. When there are two broods, as there sometimes are in Vermont, the male may nest with another female. The female, with another male.

Young male indigo buntings don't learn their father's song. They may not even know who their father is. Young male buntings learn the bunting song in their second year from nearby males... and they repeat (and modify) the neighborhood dialect. This means that the songs of Indigo buntings are cultural, not biological. They don’t track genetic lineage. Bunting songs, like folk songs, are cultural memes passed down through the generations. Each young male bunting modifies the neighborhood song. Siblings develop different songs. A theme may persist for twenty years (ten bunting generations) before falling into disuse and becoming extinct.

A young indigo on the borderland may combine the songs of two neighborhoods into a hybrid song—a bilingual troubadour, a Carlos Santana or a Trini Lopez, bound in blue.

Fortress for a catbird

As a lifelong naturalist and Yankee fan, I follow a trail blazed by John Burroughs and John Muir, neither of whom paid much attention to baseball. My work has appeared in Audubon, Sierra, Sports Illustrated, National Wildlife, OnEarth, National Geographic Traveler, National Geographic Books, Yankee, The New York Times, Newsday, The Boston Globe, The Chicago Sun-Times, The Guardian, and The Daily Telegraph, among other publications. I am the author of Backtracking: The Way of a Naturalist (1987), Blood Brook: A Naturalist's Home Ground (1992), and Liquid Land: A Journey Through the Florida Everglades (2003), among other works of nonfiction. I received the Burroughs Medal in 2004, the highest literary honor awarded to an American nature writer. E.O. Wilson called America's The Rise and Fall of the Timber Rattlesnake (2016) a beautifully written book [that] demonstrates just how good nature literature can be.

Beginning on 14 March 2020, the day after I returned home from Costa Rica, at the onset of the pandemic lockdown, I started writing a daily journal—part natural history, part memoir, and part commentary—which appeared here on Substack. Since the 25 August 2021 post, I edited the 526 entries (deleting, combining, modifying) into a new book, The Promise of Sunrise: Finding Solace in a Broken World, which Green Writers Press published on the vernal equinox 2025.

Jennette Fournier's illustrations, many of which are originals (including an otter, a bobcat, chickadees, and a black bear), a playful Winnie-the-Pooh-esque map, and a commissioned watercolor cover grace the book.

From: Seven Days

The Promise of Sunrise: Finding Solace in a Broken World

Ted Levin, Green Writers Press, 400 pages. $21.95.

A pissed-off woodpecker flies in and screams...

When COVID-19 crashed into his life in 2020, naturalist Ted Levin began taking a walk each day at sunrise through the woods and wetlands around his home in Thetford. His walks begat a daily blog and now a lyrical book that brings to life the world of efts and otters, warblers and wrens, chickadees and coyotes. Engaging natural history lessons — loon semen and mammoth bones make an appearance — weave through the daily entries, and slowly the reader also learns the story of the author's life.

Levin's writing can be extraordinarily vivid: Coyotes "hurl their voices at the crescent moon"; a bobcat has a face "like a soiled, fraying softball"; chickadees are "four maestros working on a score." Writing such as this demands to be read as one reads poetry, in small sips, to be fully savored.

—Candace Page.