5:05 a.m. 60 degrees, wind ENE 0 mph. Sky announces the first morning of summer: clouds an amalgam of shapes, sizes, and textures, from monster mounds of cotton to lines and windrows; mostly shades of blue, gray, and white, with hints and edgings of rose and mauve; hot white highlights two F-stops brighter than everything else. Mist thin and inconsequential: low across the center of the wetlands, absent elsewhere; a haze over the pond. The woods, green-shaded and cool, hums with mosquitos, which, fortunately, can't penetrate denim. Blue flag iris still flowers along the lip of the pond. Mountain maple flowers on the edge of the wetlands, loose stems of upright or nodding clusters. Individual flowers, tiny and white, attended by thrips.
DOR: hairy-tailed mole and chipmunk sans head.
AOR: White-tailed deer and robins.
A plump woodcock flies in front of me, wings whistling: stout head; big dark eyes set high; knitting-needle bill pointed downward as though dowsing for earthworms. The color of earth upon which it lives—mottled browns and blacks and buffy orange. I've walked a short distance away from an incubating female to fetch camera gear and never found her or her nest again.
Woodcock are sandpipers, a large family embedded within order Charadriiformes, which includes plovers, gulls, and terns, among other groups. Woodcock are doing better than most other sandpipers, their prosperity based on choices made long ago. They're homebodies, less worldly, which has allowed them, successfully if inadvertently, to bypass the gauntlet of environmental ills that now plague other globe-trotting shorebirds. Arthur Cleveland Bent, a supreme citizen scientist during the first half of the twentieth century who wrote the twenty-one volume series Life Histories of North American Birds, called woodcock mysterious hermit of the alders. What Bent could not have known at the time was that woodcock were in a far better position to survive the twenty-first century than many other shorebird species because eons ago, woodcock abandon the shore for the woods.
Pileated works the old big-toothed aspen. Sees me; flies away. Red-eyed vireos especially loud. Warblers especially quiet. A veery calls, a harsh note repeated at intervals. Scolding. Lands on a branch in front of me. Follows me down the road. Scolds again. Yellowthroat and chestnut-sided warbler hunt the alder leaves. More concerned with eating than singing.
Snapping turtle mid-pond, floating, its carapace an archipelago of spikes and points. Our truest, oldest, meanest-looking turtle watched the dinosaurs live and die. They've been laying white, round eggs in sandy loam for eighty million years, and have witnessed the drift of continents, the birth of islands, the drowning of coastlines, the rise and fall of mountain ranges, the spread of prairies and deserts, the comings and goings of glaciers. They've witnessed humans cross the Bering Land Bridge, the arrival of Conquistadors and Pilgrims and Russian whalers, the slave trade, too many wars to mention, Spanish flu of 1918, the Stock Market Crash, polio, assassinations, the Beatles, the Miracle Mets, riots, climate change, the internet, globalization, protests and persecutions, and, now, Covid-19.
Snapping turtles: hatch-faced and ill-tempered, their deep beauty based on endurance and adaptability.