Homeboy at Home During Coronavirus

July 12, 2020: Coyote Hollow, Thetford Center, VT

5:27 a.m. 72 degrees, wind S 10 mph. Sky: gray, overcast, and indecisive; begins in mist, ends in showers; in between alternates drizzle, fog, sprinkle; Gove Hill in hiding. Leaves in motion and every branch hung with rain. Wetlands: mistless, and in sharp relief. Pond: mistook a fist-sized, broken branch for a snapping turtle head. Patches of white ash seeds litter road. Red-flowering raspberry sheds petals, magenta spots on the dark earth. Turn my collar to mosquitos and deer flies, which are everywhere and hungry. 

DOR: American toad and pickerel frog

AOR: Hermit thrush pauses on the shoulder; looks both ways and then flies across.

Tanager in full voice in oaks. House wren at warp speed goes off in the pines. Infectious laugh of a pileated. Blue jays are kvetching, while drawn-out fluty voices thrush and veery enliven dank woods. Only two ovenbirds sing this morning. They've fallen off the sylvan version of this week's Billboard's Hot 100, number one spot occupied by red-eyed vireo for the eleventh week in a row. Three more weeks and vireos equal Queen's run with Bohemian Rhapsody.

Deer prancing through woods above the pond; dogs, eyes riveted and ears up, come to life. Bat behind barn door; the first time in more than a month. It seems to be grooming one shadowy wing, then the other. 

Yesterday, a friend in Vershire banded five kestrel chicks, ensconced at the bottom of a nestbox. One fuzzy glutton, recently fed, had several inches of bright red tail sticking out of its mouth, the aftermath of a colorful feast. The tail belonged to a northern red-bellied snake—ventral scales overlapping like shingles—a splendid little snake, tan above, red below, an eater of slugs and snails, caught crossing open ground. Regardless of what the scientific literature says, the parent kestrel, the ultimate opportunist, took what was below it, an extended, thin package of protein for a developing chick. I think of kestrels eating grasshoppers, dragonflies, and meadow voles but that's the beauty of natural history . . . just when you think you know something about something, something pops up that surprises you. Expands options; maybe in a direction, you didn't know possible. Years ago, while watching hawks migrate over Fire Island, a fellow birder told me when he was a boy in the 1920s, he saw a kestrel snatch a smooth green snake on the Hempstead Plains, near Garden City, a disjunct bit of tallgrass prairie now occupied by shopping malls. And, more recently, I received a photograph of a timber rattlesnake out on the limb of an Iowa oak, a sapsucker in its mouth. Who would have thought a rattlesnake would climb a tree and wait for a bird to pass by, a solo analog of Waiting for Godot.

Natural history: a mutating jigsaw puzzle; every piece joins for a moment; then, every piece changes shape to fit another circumstance, and circumstances, endless and pliant, are timeless. To be surrounded by variation, magic's accelerant . . . an antidote to boredom. The perfect companion for a COVID walk.