Another Morning in Paradise
23 April 2025 (day after Earth day) Hurricane Hill (1,100 feet), White River Junction, Vermont
5:24 a.m. (twenty-nine minutes before sunrise). Thirty-six degrees, wind Northwest four miles per hour, gusting to eleven. Sky: immaculate, blue and cloudless. The crescent moon, lonely in the southeast. In anticipation of the sun, the New Hampshire ridgeline glows a warm orange, not too heavy, denser than sherbet, duller than an oriole. The sun rises due east over Moose Mountain, precisely ninety degrees from where I stand, farther north than in winter, when it rose out of the gravel works in West Lebanon and tracked directly above Hurricane Hill. Daffodils open, and flowers nod in subservience to the rising sun. Red maples, fully flowered. Crowns glow, a warm, subtle brick-red, not the October knockout blow when the hillsides achieved chromatic density.
Annals of a Secretive Neighbor: Silent and hidden by day, I haven't seen either barred owl since I returned home from Colorado two weeks ago. Yesterday, dueting began at dusk in the evergreens downhill from my deck—hoots and caterwauls, back and forth. After dark, the owls shifted location. Once asleep, whenever I opened my eyes, pronouncements poured through the open windows; so close I’d sit up and contemplate tracking them down. Serenades end by civil twilight, leaving me lacing my sneakers, bereft in the mudroom.
5:17 a.m. Juncos and robins take over the airwaves from owls.
5:37 a.m. Chickadees and titmice join in. Six minutes later, phoebe's rasping vocals roll out of the shed. Then, a short flight for a gray moth.
Department of Percussionists: 5:52 a.m. Sapsucker, disjointed taps, and pileated drumroll, one loud burst, then none, accenting the morning. Hairy woodpecker, rapid-fire; downy, not so much. Red-bellied woodpecker and flicker, content to scream. Ruffed grouse, somewhere in the dim woods, wings worrying dawn.
Two tongue-tied crows, reticent as rutabagas, pass southeast, low overhead. Well above the forest crown, a solitary raven, slow-motion wingbeats make up for hushed crows; a burst of well-spaced gargling notes, no two quite the same, heads west, black feathers a gorgeous sheen.
Hermit thrush and winter wren croon ... solid-gold melodies—the sweetness of sunrise. I can't get enough of either one.
And the Background Vocalists: red- and white-breasted nuthatch; white-throated, song, chipping, and a lone tree sparrow on its way home to the Canadian hinterlands (I hope his border-crossing papers are in order); goldfinch; Carolina wren, screaming; red-winged blackbird; voluble blue jays, move from tree to tree in pairs, morning's spokesbirds; ruby-crowned and golden-crowned kinglets; cedar waxwing, pine warbler.
Pond Doings: Spring peepers are in charge, waiting in silence for the day to warm. Newts inhale wood frog eggs, a breakfast of raw omelets. Fortunately, wood frogs lay eggs by the thousands—every pond and vernal pool a congestion of anticipation.
Department of Border Security: Who's in charge when the Neotropical migrants swarm our southern border? Birds and butterflies and dragonflies, international citizens of the hemisphere. Wings on fire, rushing home to breed. They cross the Gulf of Mexico and the Rio Grande by the billions, storming our perimeters and exploiting our resources. Then, in the dark of night, they invade Canada on a warm southern breeze, storming the Bastille, lampooning current conventional edicts. I.C.E. be damned.
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. 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 a Seven Days review.
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.