Homeboy at Home During Coronavirus (and power outage)
October 5, 2020: Coyote Hollow, Thetford Center, VT
6:34 a.m. 39 degrees, wind W 0 mph. Sky: overcast with irregular highlights; on the far-side of sunrise, clouds dissociate, flesh-colored edgings. Permanent streams: the sweet, soothing sound of moving water, albeit rather slowly. Wetlands: treetop haze, lid on a bowl of reeds; the green ribbon of the main channel greener; everything else collapsible brown, weighed down my wind and rain . . . soon to be broken by snow. Three flickers fly northeast to southwest across the marsh, white rumps over brown reeds, semaphoric flashes. Pond: mist with hooded mergansers, one non-breeding male and two young-of-the-years females, in tandem; scull to the north end of the pond, rippling the water; then dive, one after the other. Bobbing to the surface with food. Beetle larvae? Tadpoles? Chicken-salad sandwiches? Too far, too misty to tell.
A world of matted, dull-colored leaves, wet that leaves stick to everything: upright trees, boulders, rocky streambeds, roadside, patches of hay-scented ferns, lawns, driveways; summer's funeral, autumn's chore, winter's insulation, spring's nourishment. Alders still green. Red oak and beech: rust and copper.
The red-shouldered hawk flies up the Hollow, leading with his voice, which lingers like shards of broken glass. Crow rapidly clucks, the banging of hollow sticks, suddenly switches to a more familiar caw. Visions of May: hermit thrush in the lilacs, the barn, hushed and withered echos of another season. An ensemble of woodpeckers: pileated, downy, hairy (several). Flush two woodcocks, a distinctive whistling of wings
Six or seven hyperactive golden-crowned kinglets in white spruce, hovering, probing, pecking, crowns radiant. Kinglets hover, nearly vertically, just above twig tips, like a hummingbird but slower vertical flaps. I'm not at all sure a Vermont bird has a more beautiful head—the golden crown and black and white facial stripes. Otherwise, a rather plain, quiet songbird.
Nearly as small as a ruby-throated hummingbird, kinglets do not go into torpor, as chickadees do, during cold winter nights. Capable of enduring temperatures up to -40 degrees Fahrenheit, golden-crowned kinglets bunch together to conserve heat and feed all day on soft-bodied insects and spiders and their eggs. In winter, I find them with mixed flocks of chickadees and nuthatches. But one winter morning, several years ago, from a bridge over Goose Creek, in northern Virginia, I ran past dozens and dozens of golden-crowned kinglets that enlivened the riverine cottonwoods and box elders, the largest kinglet gathering I've seen. I mostly see just a few, drizzling high, thin unconsolidated notes from a density or spruce or hemlock.
A thankfully serendipitous ramble: hoping for late warblers, I received early kinglets, sprites of the northern woodlands.