Another Morning in Paradise
04 September 2024: Hurricane Hill (1,100 feet), White River Junction, Vermont
5:52 a.m. 46 degrees, wind SW 1 mph. Low humidity, a landscape in sharp, rolling relief from Moose Mountain north past Smarts, Cube, and, in the far northeast, the looming mass of Moosilauke, gateway to the White Mountains, a blue-gray block of granite very likely frosted. The transformation of river water: a line of fog like spun sugar, cotton thick, low, white, and touched by the sun. Across the White River, pockets of mist rise from green ridgeline creases, straight up, thin, and dispersing ... the ephemeral campfires of a cool September morning. Twenty-two species of birds, including two warblers ( yellow-rumped and common yellowthroat), four woodpeckers (northern flicker, pileated, downy, and hairy—all noisy), rose-breasted grosbeak in maple, savannah sparrow in goldenrods bent and brightened by sunrise, and red-eyed vireo whispering in the hardwoods.
Gray squirrel in a stand of young hemlocks, leaping, not climbing. I watch the branches dance and occasionally glimpse the squirrel—more rabbit than rodent—as it progresses toward a neighbor's bird feeder.
Five crows fly north, jittery stitches across an azure sky, luminously black against immaculate blue, fade-away caws in their wake. A lone raven, much more powerful, a Schwarzenegger among corvids, heads toward New Hampshire, deep, methodical wingbeats brushed by the rising sun.
A female common yellowthroat, a first-year bird, hunts through the interior of a honeysuckle. The yellowthroat surfaces as though coming up for air, beak clamped on a spider, its long legs splay across the bird's face like a Mardi Gras mask. Numbed by the cold, the spider offers no resistance. Clap, clap, spider tenderized, yellowthroat swallows, blinks, and then returns for more.
Chickadees foraging in the aspen, one tiny caterpillar at a time. Nuthatches wander up and down pine trunks, probing into the micro spaces of bark, eating life too small to recognize. Golden-crowned kinglet and brown creeper, voices barely audible above the crickets, forage in the hardwoods; creeper against the trunk, kinglet in the leaves, hovering.
Although a hummingbird on a twig warms itself in yellow light, I haven't seen one at the feeders in two days, from six or seven to zero.
I stand on the rim of Hurricane Hill, a season in flux … a world in flux. And I remain, for the moment, a prisoner of the moment, alone with a dog on an extraordinary walk on an ordinary morning.
I miss doing this with you every morning!
Such a delight