Another Morning in Paradise

04 August 2024: Hurricane Hill (1,100 feet), White River Jct., Vermont

5:08 a.m.: 67 degrees, wind WNW 2 mph. Overcast, foggy and drizzling. Dripping leaves prolong the rain. There is no sense of topography ... one extensively gray, featureless landscape. Sunrise colors are sported on the backs of birds, primarily goldfinches and a lone male oriole. Nineteen species of birds, including one warbler (black and white), the first black-billed cuckoo of the summer, stammering in the shadows, and the last of the vocal red-eyed vireos. 

DOR (dead-on-road): A green frog recently metamorphosed (life can be harsh on a dead-end back road), and an adult male ring-necked snake the length and diameter of a #2 pencil; Jordan backed over the snake on his way to Seattle (life can be challenging in my garage).

In order of vocal appearance: northern cardinal, out of the gloom; American crow, commuting at dawn; mourning dove, wings louder than voice; black-capped chickadee, singing for reasons known only to the chickadee.

Loudest bird: pileated woodpecker, laughing in obscurity. The quietest bird: ruby-throated hummingbird. I could watch hummingbirds all day, zipping, chasing, jousting with each other, and helicoptering around the feeders and in and out of the pergola. One of Earth's innumerable miracles is the passage of hummingbirds across the Gulf of Mexico past a gauntlet of gulls, merlins, and storms big enough to brush Vermont. 

Up the road, a black bear took down my neighbor’s pole feed, bending the metal like putty.

Down the road, Jordan fledged. He left for a job in Seattle, his car crammed with clothes, shoes (think Imelda Marcos), and sporting equipment—hockey gear, baseballs and mitts, dumbbells, a surfboard, and a mountain bike. Jordan left before—college and graduate school, a year in a Covid-19 lab in Cambridge. This morning, I said goodbye, teary-eyed, knowing my home would no longer be his home. Robins say goodbye to multiple broods, two, sometimes three times a summer ... they must cry their way through autumn.