Another Morning in Paradise

04 July 2025: Hurricane Hill (1,100 feet), White River Junction, Vermont

5:43 a.m. (Half an hour before sunrise). Fifty-four degrees, no mosquitoes, wind Northwest four miles per hour, gusting to eight. Clear sky, light blue grades to pale cantaloupe as the sun climbs above the river fog and low, hill-hugging clouds. Above the White River, thick fog, mirroring the river, flows east ... slower than I walk. As the sun elevates, the fog disperses. Becomes mist, softening the woodland contours and muting green—an expanding breath of pastel orange: Tissue-thin and splendid, the consolation for waking up at 3:45.

Before the Color: red-eyed vireo, barely pausing for breath, sings in the maples as though his tail's on fire. Chickadees and juncos join in (though not nearly as persistently). Then, a blue-headed vireo and a winter wren, beautifully aloof, neither of whom I've heard in more than a month.

After the Color: Thirty-one species, including five warblers (northern parula, black-throated green, common yellowthroat, ovenbird, and chestnut-sided). Indigo bunting croons from a summit of spruce, deepest blue (stands out, a dark spec against the pale vestment). Not expected—Baltimore oriole and brown thrasher. Brown creeper and cedar waxwing both whisper (one in the air, the other in the woods). Gutteral ravens, three, in conversation, report the morning's news.

Department of Entitlement: Along the side of the road, chipping sparrow fledglings hop after their caregiver, bumping and nudging, in the relentless pursuit of food. Less circumspect, four woodpeckers in training—two sapsuckers and two hairy—chase their respective fathers around the maples. Twitter, twitter, twitter. Dissent of the famished. Reminds me of dinner prep after a Little League game.

A Second Go-Around: Last evening, above the deck, the undulating performance of a male ruby-throated hummingbird. Like me, a female in the lilac was mesmerized. Lilac to the deck, rising and falling. A full-bore performance. Tight loops by a tiny Casanova. From the standpoint of energy output, a male hummingbird can afford summer-long, full-court displays (he may father three broods) and engage in constant territorial defense of flowers and feeders. He consumes up to ten calories of food a day, the equivalent of two to three times his body weight. He has no social life other than sperm donation and territorial defense. The female chooses the nest site. Builds the nest. Incubates. Supervises chicks and fledglings. And, when she's through, she may mate a second time ... possibly with another male.

Male ruby-throated hummingbirds weigh three grams (females slightly more), about as much as a quarter tablespoon of sugar or three plastic paperclips. To support sustained hovering, hummingbirds consume more energy per gram of body mass than any other group of vertebrates. Proportionally speaking, if I had their appetite, I would require 267,200 calories a day, the equivalent of 3,425 chocolate chip cookies or 1,113 double-scoop bowls of ice cream. That's two hundred fourteen cookies or seventy bowls of ice cream per hour for each of the sixteen hours of summer daylight. Even Joey Chestnut can't do that.

More than thirty million years ago, hummingbirds diverged from swifts, their closest relatives. A mutation in the muscles of ancestral hummingbirds initiated a chain reaction over millions of years, a process akin to a biblical begetting—rotating of the flight bones, increasing the pulmonary surface area, and the number of mitochondria, as well as a denser capillary system, all of which accompanied the evolution of hovering. Hovering permitted the consumption of nectar, which fostered longer bills and tongues and the loss of down feathers to enhance lightness. Without down, to protect against heat loss, hummingbirds enter a state of hypothermic torpor at night, reducing their metabolism by up to fifty percent.

Why don't hummingbirds become obese, bloated, or succumb to diabetes? They evolved hyper-efficient liver enzymes that break down sugars and fats. And, with all the intake of liquids, hummingbirds evolved the ability to pee, rare among birds, often while drinking nectar. (They have no bladder and no urinary storage capacity.)

Department of Subsurface Humbling: I step under the front yard pergola, where vine honeysuckles entwine the four posts and thread through the latticed roof. Red, bundles of flowers. Many dozens. Tubular hummingbird bouquets. A male ruby-throat hovers in front of a bundle, wings a blur, beating two hundred times a second, heart pumping more than a thousand times a minute. The tongue probes one flower. Then, another. Feeds in place, suspended.

Alone, under the pergola, I see his throat, a flash of red. Marvel at the condensation of his history. Then, nourished and refreshed, like the bird himself, I pass into the mudroom and prepare for a nap.

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.