Another Morning in Paradise

01 November 2024: Hurricane Hill, White River Junction, Vermont

6:57 a.m., twenty-nine minutes before sunrise, White River's second latest sunrise of 2024. Sixty-one degrees, wind Southwest 7 miles per hour, gusting to 18. Overcast—dreary, dull, drizzly. Sky grades to mottled, clouds stretching thin in random places—lines of incipient daylight across a tarnished heaven—like silver candle sticks that need buffing. Clouds are on the move, southwest to northeast. Sun arrives unannounced. Tree crickets in chorus, again, after a long absence. (An odd Halloween: I had no trick-or-treaters, killed two mosquitoes, and took a dose of doxycycline for an infected tick bite.) Here and there, a red oak leaf loosened by the wind floats across the road. Woodcock flushes from damp leaves, led by knitting needle bill. Pointed wings astir. A plump bird with a round head. My attention draws to woodcock; a brazen leaf hits me. Eleven species of birds, including barred owl, red-tailed hawk, hairy woodpecker, northern cardinal, American goldfinch, and black-capped chickadee. I rue the day I don't see a chickadee, pert and perky, gregarious and tolerant. Liberated and integrated—mixed-species flocks. Sets the tone for the woodlands. Maybe we should pay chickadees more attention.

Red-tail in a maple. Stares me down. Then bolts. Long, lazy flaps and glides. Lands farther up the road, on another maple limb, hunched over, eyes wide, unblinking. Provocatively, three crows respond—unleash a barrage of caws. Hawk departs and leaves crows chattering among themselves.

Last night, my windows opened (the first time in weeks), and I heard the barred owl call—more wail than bark—one longish note riding the night current through my bedroom. Then, on my way home this morning, I see the owl in roadside hemlock, fifteen feet above the ground, steeply leaning—head to talons—peering into the roadside gully. A sizeable feathered lump, eyes and ears fixed on the warp and weft of goldenrods ... huddled by the season. Owl leans farther, looking, listening, and then falls into a dive. Head follows feet. The head pulls back and hits the ground feet first. Rises from the gully, straight up, meadow vole in tow. Lands on the metal box of an electric line twenty feet in front of me. Moves vole from talons to bill, head first, then swallows, mouth stretched to limit, eyes closed. Vole idles in the grocery bag crop, a very noticeable bulge. 

Like a dissolving daydream, the owl decamps into the hemlocks, leaving me on the road with a dog who couldn't care less.

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 Guardian, and The Daily Telegraph. I am the author of Backtracking: The Way of 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. The Promise of Sunrise: Finding Solace in a Broken World, born during the pandemic here in Substack, will be published by Green Writers Press in March 2025.

https://greenwriterspress.com/book/the-promise-of-sunrise-finding-solace-in-a-broken-world/