Another Morning in Paradise

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

4:38 a.m. (thirty-three minutes before sunrise). On the cusp between nautical and civil twilight (birds are up, and I don't need a flashlight to walk the road). Fifty-four degrees, wind South one mile per hour, gusting to two, not that I notice. Rising river fog slowly blots a colorless, clean sky, creeps uphill, sifting through a sieve of branches and leaves. Visibility reduced to several hundred yards; blurs the smooth outline of trees, softens, then vanishes... a Polaroid in reverse. The sun sneaks into the sky, and the atmosphere brightens. But much of the landscape remains hidden.

Department of Flowers: Peaking oxeye daisy. Fading red-flowering raspberry. First black-eyed Susans. Rhododendron, gone by—an ordinary green mound, but still a fortress for an inventive catbird—purple bouquets wilted while I was away in the Northwest.

A hundred yards uphill, a deer manifests out of mist, bolts across the road, tail up—a clatter of gravel. Dog, oblivious, lost in the latest edition of odors.

Awoke to caterwauling barred owls and chattering junco, 3:48 a.m.

Among thirty-six species of birds, scarlet tanager, rose-breasted grosbeak, and American robin, a contrast of warbled phrases. Rapid, husky, pack-a-day tanager. Sweeter, slower grosbeak. Familiar, ubiquitous robin, everywhere, all at once. Warbling and red-eyed vireos. Nine warblers: ovenbird, chestnut-sided, black and white, black-throated green, northern parula, yellow, American redstart, common yellowthroat, and pine (in the pines and voluble). Eastern phoebe chatty; eastern wood pewee and great crested flycatcher (known neighbors, mute as marmalade). The proclamations of crows. The silence of blue jays.

On the Mercurial Threshold of Species: Indigo bunting on an electric line faces south. Color and voice cut through the rolling fog. Benjamin Moore lists 446 shades of blue, none of which is called Bunting Blue. The paint giant missed a remarkable, irreducible shade. Darker than either an eastern bluebird or a cerulean warbler. Darker than the sky. An almost neon color equipped to stun.

I watched Lazuli buntings last week, singing in the crowns of sagebrush and willows in the canyons of central Washington. Sounded like indigos and looked like bluebirds (except for a conical bill), complete with a reddish upper chest. I hadn't heard a Lazuli in twenty-five years and hadn't considered them a possibility in the folded barrens east of the Columbia River. But there they were, bolt upright and full of verve. Singing dawn to dusk. How similar the song is to an indigo. Identical posture. Comparable behavior. Plump, colorful songbirds nestled among the greenery alongside a cascading creek, voices rising above the falling water.

It's no wonder Lazuli and indigo buntings interbreed at the zone of overlapping ranges on the Northern Plains and the Desert Southwest. The borderline between species can be messy. Darwin knew that.

Department of Unmitigated Gratitude: Jordan left home ten months ago, not exactly a fledgling. Took a job in Tacoma. Signed a three-year contract. Lives in West Seattle, upstairs from a massage studio, next door to a gourmet Italian restaurant, and across the street from an upscale, Greek Revival Airbnb, several hundred yards from Puget Sound. He can see the water and the Olympic Mountains from his deck through a web of electrical lines.

When he and his brother were infants, Linny and I began taking them everywhere. It's no wonder he lives in the Pacific Northwest, and Casey lives in Colorado. I shouldn't be surprised they wound up on the other end of the country; they grew up exploring the contours of North America, and when it came time to forge their way, they had a continent to choose from.

Vermont's lonelier without them ... but I do venture west. Often. Last week I visited Jordan. He took me on a whale watch. We saw orcas, Stellar's sea lions, harbor seals, and a female elephant seal that I mistook for a bleached log hauled out on the beach. Two days later, he took me camping east of the Cascades. (Crawling out of a tent to pee in the middle of the night had unimaginable complications, a Senior Citizen’s Olympic event.) One evening, we spent twenty minutes at sunset attempting to turn a distant immature bald eagle into a golden eagle—a very dark bird on a very dark escarpment.

Seems only yesterday that he held my thumb while we crossed the street. Now, he unzips the tent for me.

Photographs by Ted Levin

Bureau of Land Management Land, east of the Cascades. Land held in trust for the people of the United States.

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 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 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.