5:35 a.m. 49 degrees, wind E 0 mph. Sky: a thin sheet of striated clouds, pale pink wash; three-quarter moon mid-valley, bright but fading. Permanent streams: upper, a slight murmur, less water than yesterday; lower, a visible flow, faintly audible, and then retreats underground, again—the landscape beyond thirsty. Wetlands: low, sparse ground-hugging fog softens colors across the marsh; serrated crowns of evergreens in sharp relief. Pond: quiet surface; mist like pipe smoke, slightly adrift, and then straight up. Overripe: red raspberries. Peaking: blueberries. Coming on: blackberries. Very few monarchs, which saddens me. Very few dragonflies, too. Cold morning forces deer flies and mosquitos into lockdown. For the first time in two months, I wore my denim jacket to stay warm, not as a fortress against flies.
AOR: a distant chipmunk, motionless, hastily mistaken for a thrush; a grit-mining robin
The morning belongs to goldfinches, everywhere and noisy. Pewees whistling less enthusiastically; one across the pasture hawks a moth and returns to the same oak limb . . . over and over. Treetop jays, a family group of three, either gathering green acorns or plucking cold-numbed caterpillars. Red-eyed vireos reassure me that they haven't left. Junco trills; keeps to the shadows.
Two birds, more significant than either a robin or a jay, longer but thinner, move unhurriedly, in a high aspen crown. Screened by leaves and frustratingly unidentifiable. I look into the convergence of green, set in motion by the slow-moving birds. Two minutes. Five minutes. Ten minutes. The birds in the aspen. Me on the road, chafing. The dogs puzzled but accepting. Eventually, I glimpse a cuckoo. Which species? Who knows . . . a veil of leaves conspires against me. Back at the barn, a yellow-billed cuckoo calls from the edge of the pasture, a hollow, swallowed note that hangs in the fresh air for a lukewarm moment.
When John Muir wrote, Between every two pine trees there is a door leading to a new life, he referred to the high and mighty Sierras. Had he walked between two maples in the rounded, less dramatic mountains of the Northeast, he might have made the very same comment. Our rolling terrain, far from rawboned and lofty, offers the same invitation, the same mystery to solve, and equal opportunity to lose yourself in either the grand sweep of Earth or the simple sweep of an intimate moment. The sun always rises somewhere.
Thanks, Ted - as always - for an interlude of peace and sanity during a walk, birding. A new perspective as Muir suggested.