Another Morning in Paradise

27 April 2025: Hurricane Hill (1,100 feet), White River Junction, Vermont

5:48 a.m., one minute after sunrise. Thirty-seven degrees, wind West-northwest seven miles per hour, gusting to twenty. Drizzling, cold, a gloveless walk, fingers numb. The sky is overcast and uniformly gray, with a hint of blue, dull and monotonous. Like a fox in a hen house, the sun sneaks up unnoticed (by me, anyway)—a damp, cold, finger-numbing walk.

Earthworms, stupefied by the sudden change in temperature, migrate slowly, very slowly across the dirt road—sizes vary, and it's an all-you-can-eat robin buffet.

Three days ago, red maples were in bloom, and then, quickly pollinated by wind and bees, dropped their male flowers all at once, my path red-spotted—another unvaccinated dirt road.

A few sugar maples are in flower, trees engulfed in a yellow-green haze. Others lag, buds in various stages of swelling. Last year's seeds (keys), viable through the winter, germinate at thirty-four degrees, the lowest-known germinating temperature for a northern hardwood. Seedlings may sprout at the edge of a retreating snowpack—the first, fresh grazeable crop for woodland vegetarians.

Robins sleep in. Not chickadees, sweet song in full force. Everywhere, all at once.

6:05 a.m.: One goldfinch joins the chickadee chorus.

6:07 a.m.: A robin agitatedly calls. Wakes up crabby ... on the wrong side of the branch.

6:10 a.m.: Chipping sparrow trills, patter, patter, patter, song mimics the rain.

6:18 a.m.: Red-bellied woodpecker calls. Pileated and flicker, laughing and pounding.

6:36 a.m.: Robins make up for lost time. Sapsucker and downy woodpecker engage respective tree limbs. (There's no mistaking who's who.)

On the eve of leaving for another trip to Costa Rica, the blue-headed vireo is the only bird I haven't seen or heard in White River that I would have expected to see by the end of April. I've already seen or heard Wilson's snipe, broad-winged hawk, house wren, and myrtle warbler. Where are those turtle-paced vireos?

If I see any lingering Neotropical migrants, I'll usher them along.

Department of Joyful Anticipation: I want to see a Costa Rican jaguar or harpy eagle, both found in minimal numbers on the Osa Peninsula (Corcovado National Park) and in Tortuguero National Park—diagonally across the country: Tortuguero, in the northeast along the Caribbean (just south of Nicaragua) and Corcovado, in the southwest along the Pacific (just north of Panama). Between the two are many volcanoes, cone-shaped in the north, separated by broad valleys, and welded into an imposing range of mountains in the south, rising in places to more than ten thousand feet.

Corcovado and Tortuguero have something in common. Both are wild, old-growth jungles with buttress-trunked trees intertwined with lianas, speckled with epiphytes, and with roots above and below the surface laced together in nutrient-sharing knots. Monkeys. Sloths. Macaws. Rainbow-colored frogs. Clouds of noisy parrots and more than fifty species of hummingbirds. I've never been to Tortuguero, but last year in Corcovado, just after sunrise, I watched three Baird's tapirs swim the mouth of a tidal river to a narrow peninsula, the Pacific rising around them, and then browse overhanging vegetation, belly-deep in water. Simultaneous bathing and eating. On the tail-end of our continent, an unexpected tropical communion of sea and land.

Overhead, a three-fingered sloth. A most primitive placental mammal. Looks like the jungle. Smells like the jungle. So methodically slow and unhygienic that algae and fungi grow in its fur, supporting colonies of endemic moths of several species that survive nowhere else. A most charming mammal, but sloths are not as dumb as they seem. They're dumber.

Amidst Costa Rican reverie, I must ensure the natives know … I didn't vote for him.

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 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.