Another Morning in Paradise

21 October 2024: Hurricane Hill (1,100 feet), White River Junction, Vermont

7:04 a.m. Wind S 2 mph (gusting to 6). The grace of the sky: mottled, crowded with color; far more in the heavens than in the hills (mostly departed)—luminescent rose and orange clouds, long, thick, peeling, slowly grade into a pink-gray and mauve above Hurricane Hill. Golden light. Copper light. Butterscotch light. I can't stop looking up ... momentous and fleeting, a monument to starting the day in the dark. Along the empty road, chickadees and me below a Benjamin Moore sunrise. Frost-free meadow, goldfinches and white-throated sparrows in attendance. Twelve species of birds, including the first warbler I've seen in several weeks (yellow-rumped), mourning dove, American crow, blue jay, black-capped chickadee, tufted titmouse, red-breasted nuthatch, cedar waxwing (high-pitched twitters), dark-eyed junco, and two hawks (red-tailed and Cooper's).

D. O. R. (dead-on-the-road): meadow vole, still warm. Perhaps dropped by a predator. Hawk? Cat?

An adult redtail flies into a roadside maple, a silhouetted on a limb, hunched over, searching. Taunting crow, hurling invectives from afar, drives hawk from its perch. Hawk across the meadow, escorted by ribald caws and shrieks. Sunlight bushes hawk’s autumn tail, rusty like an oak leaf.

An off-Broadway production, a telluric drama. Protagonist: Cooper's hawk. Antagonists: blue jays. A chorus of agitated jays chase hawk downhill, barely above the treetops. Hawk lands in a roadside maple, bathed in rich light. A stud of a bird. Blue-gray above. Copper-striped below. Dark crown. Eyes like embers, red as the sunrise. Upright and hyper-alert. Defiant. A long, rounded tail extends well beyond the ends of the short, folded wings. Jays keep a respectful distance, showering insults. Enough is enough. Hawk departs, alternating stiff, choppy wingbeats and short glides, disappearing into the morning. Jays fall silent.

The play ends as it begins in an empty sky. 

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 January 2025.

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