5:10 a.m. 66 degrees, wind NNW 0 mph. Sky: a light powder blue suffused with pastel pink, a wispy remnant of a cloud far to the south and a vital, slightly more than half-moon, as bright and shiny as a newly minted quarter. Permanent streams: not nearly as stable as my persistence to called them permanent; upper stream a Sisyphean current, on groundwater life-support; lower reduced to a puddle with a faint flow; any connection to the wetlands subterranean, deranged drainage. Wetlands: along the far shore, the sawtoothed crowns of spruce and fir rise out of a bowl of striated mist. Pond: a light fog rolling southeast like breath on a chilly morning. In the company of an entourage of deer flies and mosquitoes, more persistent than the water in the streams.
DOR: a small green frog, newly minted.
AOR: grit-gathering junco and robin.
Step outside to a red-shouldered hawk, far to the southwest, a piercing screech that carries valley to valley, vivifying the morning. Tanager in the oaks, pack-a-day voice, prosaic song, original color, a bird with a tropical look and a middle-latitude song, rubbed raw by competition with the more musically gifted. Juncos make their presence known: singing lustily and flitting across the road. Ovenbird as loud as ever; red-eyed vireo as persistent. A veery and a robin in a ritualized, aerial scuffle, rise straight up, breast to breast, wings aflutter. No contact. No sound, except for flapping, reminiscent of very agitated paper. Robin is much more significant. Veery holds his own, resumes singing, a gifted and descending spiral on a mist-driven morning. Reason for altercation: robin must be jealous. Compared to a tananger, he'd be Sam Cooke; compared to the veery, he's Tom Waits.
A yellow-billed cuckoo calls in the fog. I can't get enough of a cuckoo, as elusive as a bobcat, drop subtle clues to odd movements, waive rules of avian protocol. Unpredictable. A mere suggestion of presence. Sits in the back of the woodland classroom, shy and as still as a statue. I saw my life yellow-billed cuckoo, in the late sixties, in an apple tree, in an Indiana front yard, motionless. Framed by blossoms, cradled in a big-sky, a Midwest morning. Dawn, mid-May, 2019, in central Ohio farmland: a fallout of a dozen or more yellow-billed cuckoos, calling and exposing themselves as they darted through the canopy. The loosest of flocks, a scattering of birds with rudimentary coherence. Pointed on both ends, a feathered lance. Immaculately white underneath. Bright white spots on a long, dark tail. Rich rufous primaries. When I found one, it stayed put high in the oaks and hickories.
Coyote Hollow cuckoos, all voice and no show (thus far), are as wild and provocative as the mist that hides them, investing a muggy July morning with promise and hope. The little voice in my head says, let's find it. My dogs, charmingly incompetent, disagree. Sit in road, paws to snouts, rubbing off flies. Tracking a cuckoo in the fog, like tracking a ventriloquist. A voice from everywhere and nowhere. I surrender to the blissful ease of sunrise.