Another Morning in Paradise

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

4:47 a.m. (twenty-four minutes before sunrise). Beyond the open windows, robins (4:32 a.m.), like howler monkeys in Costa Rica, ensure my place on the road. Fifty-two degrees, wind South-southwest three miles per hour, gusting to eight. Not strong enough to hold back mosquitoes, but sufficient for aspen leaves to confer among themselves. Sixty degrees East-northeast, the sun rises into an enflamed corner of the sky between Smarts Mountain and Moose Mountain, lightly rubbled with hints of pink. As the sun ascends, clouds condense. River fog, thick as whipped cream, disperses, hiding the northern ridgeline above the White River—Jericho Hill and Dothan Hill vanish—then rolls up the southern ridgeline, the contours of Hurricane Hill softening but not erased.

Starflower in bloom. Aspen seeds adrift. The last lilac flowers spent; purple fading to brown, but the shrub is still a fortress for catbirds and northern house wrens, who sing nonstop and loudly, the jazz set—extemporizing, flourishing, fabricating music out of the moisture.

Two pairs of bald eagles nest in Hartford (I live between them), one on an island in the Connecticut River, the other along the Ottaquechee in Dewey's Mill. They'd need infrared goggles to see through the scattering river fog. Their fishing? Likely postponed.

A junco on an electric line buzzes; his lower bill keeps pace, vibrating to the beat. Upper bill, immobile. Turns around and buzzes in the opposite direction for reasons only the junco knows. Bird on a wire, my dog, indifferent. I stand directly below, mesmerized. Lemon light spreading.

Further uphill, an indigo bunting on the tip of a red spruce sings. Too far and too steep to pursue. And bunting doesn’t permit close encounters. Too timid. I watch from a distance, ethereal blue on sunlit green. The dog zigzags around the road, lost in thought and last night's aromas.

Twenty-eight species of birds, including six warblers (black-throated green, black-throated blue, black and white, chestnut-sided, yellow, and common yellowthroat) and two woodpeckers (downy and hairy) on the feeder, dumping sunflower seeds on the deck. FOY: great-crested flycatchers (at least four) and eastern wood pewees. I last saw both in Costa Rica, where they hawked moths along the Caribbean above the bleached remains of a green sea turtle, a jaguar kill.

As the fog thins, veery sings, its voice spiraling out of the damp woods. Raven above what's left of Dothan Hill, its husky voice trailing behind ... the aftermath of visibility.

Ever-Changing Taxonomy Dept. Charles Darwin was Shrewsbury, England's gift to the world. Born in 1809, Darwin spent his youth in The Mount, digging earthworms and studying flowers. When I visited in 2004, The Mount had morphed from a home into government offices. Purchased by a businessman in 2022, The Mount is being restored and will open to the public as a museum. A tribute to one of the most innovative and unifying thinkers in the annals of human thought. It was Darwin, of course, who, pondering the geographic distribution of animals and fossils, proposed that all forms of life (past and present) had a common ancestor. We are all—amoebas to albatrosses—related through mitochondrial DNA. That Darwin was unaware of genetics makes his articulation of evolution through natural selection all the more amazing.

I have no idea whether or not Charles Darwin encountered a house wren in South America. Wrens are bold and noisy, and, particularly house wrens, prone to live among people. Tolerant and adaptive. When I took my first ornithology class in the spring of 1968, the American Ornithological Union, now the American Ornithological Society (AOS), the high priest of taxonomy, recognized the house wren (Troglodytes aedon) as a hemispheric species that ranged from central Canada to the tip of South America and throughout the Antilles.

In 2024, the AOS torpedoed house wren taxonomy, splitting the species into the northern house wren (Canada south to Veracruz) and the southern house wren, as well as five other species isolated on various islands in the Antilles. An additional three species of wrens, two off the coast of Baja California and one on the Falkland Islands, had already been accorded full species status. The ochraceous wren (T. ochraceus), an endemic of the cloud forests of Costa Rica and Panama, is a confidant of quetzals and bellbirds and a kissing cousin of the northern and southern house wrens, one of twelve species (for now) in the genus Troglodytes.

I stood in front of the lilac, the northern house wren crooning, Darwin on my mind. It took a century to unravel the taxonomic mysteries of the house wren (I imagine there's more to come). It took Darwin five weeks in the Galapagos and twenty-four years of deep thought to realize the unifying principle of biology.

A drab brown-gray bird. Eyes dark. Bill, a dagger. I could hide you in the palm of my hand, yet your voice unspools the hemisphere.

Life begets life ... the unceasing mash-up of DNA. We’re all in this together.

Onward and upward across a fragile planet: I’ve recently been made aware of David Lukas, a naturalist-writer in Winthrop, Washington. Two of his recent posts highlight the fascinating physics of dandelion seed dispersal, as well as the evolution of hummingbird bills to more efficiently probe hummingbird feeders. Lukas is worth following.

www.lukasguides.com

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.