Another Morning in Paradise

20 April 2025: Hurricane Hill (1,100 feet), White River Junction, Vermont

5:46 a.m. (twelve minutes before sunrise). Forty-four degrees, wind Northwest fifteen miles per hour, gusting to thirty-three, speaks in Tongues. Limbs and branches wave, and hemlock skirts flutter up and down, back and forth—a woodland shimmy on a noisy morning. The wind is loud enough to silence runoff streams. A sky of a thousand faces: somber in the southeast, clouds bruised and magenta-trimmed; in the south, lonely half-moon, polished; across the northeast, a run of low, dark clouds like a mountain range rife with alpenglow. And in the northwest, big clouds drift obliquely across a blue sea.

Annals of the pond: wood frogs, dispersed. Peepers, hushed and below the surface. Mallards and red-shouldered hawk elsewhere.

Coltsfoot blooms along the hem of the road. Red maple buds opened yesterday (temperature in the seventies), flowers await bumblebees, while the hillside sports color ... a decidedly redder tint than yesterday. Aspen catkins pepper the ground, three inches long and fuzzy, vegetable caterpillars; pollen is in the air (and, for me, another seasonal congestion).

Dead on the Road (DOR): an earthworm caught and dried in yesterday's warm rain.

5:41 a.m. Barred owl calls from the woods below the house, where the meadow narrows and gives way to brooding evergreens. Like a boy lured by the bells of a summer ice cream truck, I follow the owl's voice into dimly lit woods, searching for a dimly colored bird ... the analog of staring into dark water looking for the shadow of a fish. My takeaway: barred owls breed in the neighborhood; they're much more secretive than they were in winter when bird feeders lured incautious and floundering red squirrels out of the trees and into the deep, backyard snow. (I'm not sure the correct pronoun, although I've taken to calling them George).

5:51 a.m. tufted titmice, black-capped chickadees, and golden-crowned kinglets singing, all close at hand.

5:57 a.m. Turkey vulture, not known to be an early riser (like my boys when they were young), tacks northwest, gliding and rocking, primary flight feathers teasing the wind.

Among the birds (thirty-two species): annoyed robins, nest construction in a lilac, chip as I walk by. Winter wrens and hermit thrushes enrich the sunrise, like Joan Baez and Judy Collins with feathers, soothing the morning. Northern flicker. Pileated. Red-bellied woodpecker. Three turkeys in the pines. Hairy and downy woodpeckers. Yellow-bellied sapsucker. Sparrows—song, chipping, white-throated, dark-eyed junco. American goldfinch. Northern cardinal. Raven and crows in the air. Blue jays in the trees loquaciously mimic everything but the wind. Cedar waxwing, a disjointed flock above the meadow, struggles to stay together. Broad-winged hawk (First-of-the-Year) whistles in an oak. Eastern phoebes patrol dooryards, one home after another, hunting eaves for spider egg sacs. Brown cowbird, squeaky in the pines, poor reputation for a bird that can't help itself. Red- and white-breasted nuthatches. Mourning dove.

Three ruby-crowned kinglets dance around the end of ash twigs, wings flicking. Tiny bundles of energy, head aflame—red crown pronounced—a speck of opalescence.

Try as I might, I neither see nor hear a warbler or vireo. Blue-throated vireos and pine and myrtle warblers are late to the party on Hurricane Hill.

You Can't Take it Back Department: Sunrise comforts me. Like fingerprints or eye scans, no two are quite alike. You have color, music, and textured wind—sometimes bitter, sometimes soothing, always bearing messages from beyond my sightline. The predictable. The unpredictable. The beautiful. A vibrant democracy of interdependent lifeforms.

Barred owls eat red squirrels. Eat garter snakes, crayfish, mice, and nestlings. Unlike people, they don't pillory neighbors (or institutions), the constituents of an autonomous forest. Owls are better behaved than that. They take what they need and leave the rest.

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, National Geographic Traveler, National Geographic Books, The New York Times, Newsday, The Boston Globe, The Chicago Sun-Times, The Guardian, and The Daily Telegraph. 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 Snake: 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 (20 March 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 a Seven Days review.

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.