6:02 a.m. 37 degrees, wind SSE 0 mph. Sky: last night, star-studded and bird-filled; this morning, pale orange wash in the east; haze from California wildfires does little to hide Mount Ascutney, forty miles away; my visibility yardstick. Wetlands: neighborhood cold pocket; mist above the reeds, frost below, crystalline and white; much too early to ruin the garden.
Once upon a time, on the doorstep of September, in the late seventies and early eighties: to deny frost, we'd cover the basal and zucchini with newspaper. Mid-October 2000s, the garden thrived, and I busied myself making fresh pesto. Last night, the cold settled into the marsh, gilded the reeds but not my garden, which has had enough problems coping with drought.
The night sky holds far more than a billion stars. An unseen pageant moves south above the face of the continent, patterns established since the Ice Age, a watershed of feathers, flyways into flyways, an outpouring of birds head to ancestral homelands, adding meaning and color to a season in transition. And predictability in an unpredictable world. Colorado State University's AeroEco Lab, a leader in the new science of radar ornithology, predicted that last night more than four hundred million migratory birds would be aloft over North America. Fifty million over the Northeast, which includes more than two million over Vermont. I think I heard seven, thin peeps, chips, much softer than cricket chirps, an audio drizzle from a thousand feet, maybe ten thousand feet, free-fall out of the firmament. More distinctly at pre-dawn, when cold-stunned crickets fell silent. A friend, lying on her picnic table, claimed to have heard an ocean of sound, the soft woosh of busy wings, as though the entire flight of songbirds and cuckoos and whippoorwills and hummingbirds, two million steadfast birds passed over her. A wonderful image . . . but more likely, she suffered tinnitus. I have suspicions.
Amid the noise of blue jays, crows, chickadees, and nuthatches, bands of warblers and vireos, mumbling incoherently and screened by yellowish leaves, pass through the canopy, refueling on numb insects. Too high, too indistinct to recognize. Four wood thrush, the first I've seen since late May, erect and synchronized like the guards at Buckingham Palace, patrol a neighbor's driveway. A clipped chorus of purple finches.
Most species of warblers, which breed throughout hardwood and boreal forests, fly more than a thousand miles to crowd into a fraction of the landmass they occupied during the summer. Upon arriving, they face a different suite of predators—bird-eating snakes and spiders, among them—and competitors—antbirds, manikins, and so forth—as well as to adapt to a vastly different forest structure and climate. Take the lonely eastern kingbird, a hunter of bumblebees and dragonflies over pastures and marshes. A kingbird aggressively defends its summer turf against other kingbirds and robins and tree swallows, even bald eagles (their Latin name is Tyrannus tyrannus). But, wintering in a New World jungle, kingbirds transform into gregarious and peaceable berry-eaters, a Fred Rogers among flycatchers. For me, the capacity to change, a repeatable lesson, a continuous striving.
Winters coming. Another COVID project. Arrive at amicable solutions. Follow the kingbird's example.