5:05 a.m. 68 degrees, wind SSE 7mph, mosquitos held at bay (mostly). Sky: hoary and bright, very humid. I'm not sure the atmosphere can be any more humid without springing a leak. Not a morning for outdoor, laundry-hanging. An encapsulation of May: snow to mosquitos, rather quickly; a smattering of migrants (some still on the move). Yellow birch drops more catkins. Crabapple and cherry petals sweep across the front yard. Hummingbirds and evening grosbeaks line-up at the feeder.
A doe, swollen with fawn, idles in the road, staring at me. Bounds into the wetland, tail up, vanishing into the reeds like a magician's trick. My dogs lollygag, unaware, tongues extended, moisture condensing and dripping. By now, wolves would have organized a hunt, would have drawn their strategy in the sand. It's amazing what five thousand years of selective breeding accomplished . . . wolf to dog: genetic root canal.
Red-shouldered hawk, fixed to the last snag standing, watches the wetland wake up . . . an unconfined perspective. Least flycatcher overhead on a red pine limb. An olive-sided flycatcher (FOY) in the alders; a brief respite before moving on. Years ago, around the time the Vietnam War heated up, my ornithology prof, Dr. Wise, told me the olive-sided says, quick three beers, quick three beers. (A mnemonic device suitable for an undergraduate.) It seems early to start drinking but what do I know? I didn't arrive here on the far side of midnight. A more decorous, chestnut-sided warbler in black cherry, again, sings with no reference to suds. Favorite tree, though moored to a different twig.
Scarlet tanager high in ash, screened by leaves closer to yellow than to blue on the color wheel. Standing under the tree and looking straight up, I see red, a most brilliant red. Tanager red: a color suitable for Crayola. Transparently gorgeous, a jungle bird, straight out of a Costa Rican rainforest. Hemorrhages music: five rapid notes, hoarse and unabated, a song more powerful than despair. As if to punctuate the point, a yellow and black butterfly drifts by.
12:16 p.m. 80 degrees, wind S 9 mph. Sky: a mountain range of clouds, one leaking. In the company of three neighbors and Jordan, homebound prisoners of circumstance, I visit the goshawk nest. Three chicks as white as snowballs hug the rim, seventy-feet above the ground, fifteen feet below the canopy . . . untamable stares. Crèche: shaped like a squat ice cream cone; a platform of sticks. Their world on the half-shell. Mom, glimpsed through a tangle of limbs, flies from tree to tree, hollering. Dad patrols twenty-square miles of east-central Vermont; a hypothetical line that extends two-and-a-half miles in every direction from the nest. This implies, among other vital statistics, a maple creemee could be picked up at King Cone on his way home.
For an enchanted moment, unfettered from coronavirus, I stand in the glow of goshawks.