6:37 a.m. 66 degrees, wind SE 6 mph; stirs and liberates leaves. Sky: no mist, no ground fog; overcast, gray, blue, and white, with silver and faint peach highlights. Rumors of rain headed east from central New York. Permanent streams: patiently waiting for an afternoon storm. Wetlands: sallow complexioned, thirsty reeds on standby; along the far shoreline, red leaves grade toward brown, and along the ridge, sunlight brushes an orange crown. Pond: an exponential increase in leaf cargo, a shape-changing cluster of islands and archipelagos. Color fades. Leaves fall, a constant, soft, fluttering rain. Aspen, still as green as the Blarney stone, leaves in perpetual motion. Leafless black cherries, dark limbs twisted and gnarled, an art project of a restless wind. Here, on the doorstep of October, alders are July green. Ash in leafless silence, clothesline branches festooned with webworm tents, which dangle like old socks.
Red-shouldered hawk calls before sunrise, the town crier. One day, very soon, he'll take his voice and his chilly stare to the Carolinas. A chickadee and a white-throated sparrow sing limp versions of spring songs; all other birds the muffled language of migration. Pileated disassembling a maple branch sounds like a neighbor hanging clapboards; flies over me, an undulating flight, black and white flashes, sharp red face; off to another ant-infested tree.
Science begins with observing the world around us, coupled with the probability that what we see is repeatable. Think gravity or boiling water or the appearance of fireflies in July or brook trout spawning in November. Science is not magic or fake news. It does not embroider or embellish. In Vermont, red-shouldered hawks most often migrate in October, on the heel of a cold front, when a gentle northwest wind ushers them south. Evolution, the unifying principle of biology, is not benevolent. It's all about reproduction and survival, and in that context, both viruses and people draw similar considerations. When a novel coronavirus looms with unavoidable grimness, science is the only way to douse the pandemic. Epidemiologists are disease-tracking scientists.
Home alone, during COVID-19, I've become a self-assigned scribe who notes the comings and goings of the seasons. My fodder has been the appearance of Color, the loss of leaves, which spin and drift like errant thoughts; the noisy hawk that reminds me to get out of bed; a dustball comet. I welcomed vireos; said goodbye to warblers. I watched a family of goshawks and a pair of solitary sandpipers; listened to the sweetness of winter wrens and hermit thrushes; endured red-eyed vireos. I fondled a snakelet; removed a snapping turtle. Unexpectedly, unavoidably, and thankfully, a virus brought me closer to my homeground.