5:13 a.m. 51 degrees, wind breathless out of the N. Sky: opaque; high blue-gray ceiling, ruffled in the south. Intermittent streams stagnate. Permanent streams languish, almost inaudible. Woods in a deep, green shade. Chokecherry sheds petals. Serviceberry and hawthorn grow fruit. Striped maple keys, tiny, hang like wind chimes. Blue jays noisy; several honk; one covers a red-shouldered hawk. Mosquitos out in force.
Red-eyed vireos and ovenbirds have something to say, sing nonstop. Warblers and thrushes subdued. Turkeys hushed. Lone alder flycatcher, late to the party, still sings, still sets boundaries. In summer, scarlet tanagers are to red oaks what Mookie Betts was to the Red Sox, a colorful and joyous celebration . . . tough to imagine one without the other.
I visited the goshawks yesterday. Female kept an eye on me, hollered. Chicks hugged the nest, flattened like fluffy pancakes. I found a pellet, a tightly packed oval of gray-squirrel fur. Sans bones. Hawks, with more corrosive stomach acids than owls, leave feathers and fur but not many bones, which reduce to suggestions. One, I gathered last week, had squirrel fur and ribs and a pair of broken, hollow femurs from a mid-sized bird, maybe a robin or a blue jay. Pellets . . . a woodland vignette, a secret revealed. I've teased through merlin pellets packed with taxi-cab yellow feathers; redtail with rabbit fur; snowy owl with voles skulls that sardonically grinned back; barn owl with shrews and mice; horned owls with everything from a mink to a black racer.
My best pellet: short-eared owl. Summer of 1978, the edge of a salt marsh, Oak Beach, Long Island. I filled a grocery bag with several hundred spit up by a family of eight, the last known short-ears to nest on Long Island. One pellet had an aluminum bird band, which I mailed to the United States Fish and Wildlife Service, in Patuxent, Maryland. An acknowledgment letter said the band belonged to a common tern chick, ringed by Michael Gochfeld, from Rutgers. Thirty-eight years later, in the fall of 2016, on a pelagic trip, eighty miles off Nantucket, I met Gochfeld. He remembered the report, the only band that was ever returned to him by an owl.
Currently, I watch the tanager a long while, the sun shining weakly. In majestic degrees, he appears and disappears, sartorial elegance not burdened by a lack of self-regard.
1:05 p.m. 61 degrees, wind W 2 mph. A quick note on the goshawk front. Parents hunting, somewhere between Lyme and West Fairlee. Nest: thick, a cupless platform pressed to the pine trunk; framed by a whirl of four limbs that grow upward, each at an angle close to forty-five degrees. Chicks, alone and curious, watch me. White faces streaked with brown, darkening. Quiet, so quiet. A fresh chipmunk head, red lungs attached, in the duff below the nest . . . a snack, more concept than substance. Chicks, growing by the moment, need a lunch-wagon.
Starflower in bloom.