6:38 a.m. 37 degrees, wind SSW 5 mph. Sky: after a night of heavy rain, bright and open in the southwest, a rose-tinted flotilla pushes east. Brooding and spritzing elsewhere. Permanent streams: a Pavarotti flow, audible at a considerable distance, the infusion compliments of moisture from Lake Ontario. Wetlands: reeds of many shades, yellow-tan to mud-brown. Evergreens on the far shoreline set off by bright clouds: pagoda-shaped pines, tall, laden with cones, which hang like ornaments from the upper, outer limbs . . . a fast-food outlet; spruce, shorter, brighter green, tapered, cones too small to see; hemlocks, robust, branches like arms, an embrace of wood, thumbnail-sized cones, puny but adorable. Pond: water pours out of the overflow culvert, under the road, and into the marsh. The intermittent stream that winds down the valley's eastern rim and feeds the pond, singing loudly.
Roving red crossbills, in and out of pines, chatting in flight, eight mobile dots, a tight grouping, silhouettes against the pink, from one tree to the next, from one valley to another, nomadic diners that occasionally stay to breed. For crossbills, no sense of philopatry. Lives in devotion to the geography of cone crops. For a crossbill, philopatry is not a bond to a precise location, but to evergreens, a deep relationship with the continent's green sweep of pines, fir, spruce, hemlock, larch—from the subarctic south around the Great Lakes and down every mountain range, North Carolina to Belize, Oregon to Baja, Alaska to Colorado. Enjoy them while you can; they may be absent for years—the nature of crossbills: the story sporadic food abundance, a dietary migrancy, the original vagabonds.
The toot and yank of nuthatches, both species. Two crows, hushed, beneath the unfolding sky, usher up the sun, black birds above the marsh. Headed north, escorted by the breeze. Below crows, chickadees, at peace in humanity's chaos, patrol micro-habitats on limbs. Feeding. Calling. Pausing, now and again, to fluff out like animated stuffies, indefatigable defenders of the joy of life. I want to write with the sparkle of a chickadee. Is there anything they don't like? Well, maybe a sharp-shinned hawk or a northern shrike. Not much else. I lean on chickadees, often . . . and will again as the coronavirus torches my Thanksgiving plans.