6:02 a.m. 54 degrees, wind NNE 1 mph. Sky: ground fog yields to the rising sun; marbled sky leisurely reveals itself. Permanent streams: upper, drought reduced; losing confidence (and water); barely recognizable flow; lower, a single starving puddle. Wetlands: fog lifts; sky emerges; ashes along the far shore, overloaded with webworm tents, off-white and misshapen; thin branches bent and strapped together, end to end; constantly expanding silk tents; unpermitted new construction supports astronomical numbers of hairy caterpillars that feast on summer growth; an event as predictable as bird migration and fall color. Caterpillars targeted by a tiny parasitic wasp, which, like the creature in Alien, lays a single egg in a caterpillar; wasp larva consumes caterpillar from the inside out; leaves behind a hairy husk. Caterpillars in need of Sigourney Weaver, who won't be forthcoming. Survivers overwinter as pupa; metamorphose to white furry moths, which bear no name of their own, known only as . . . fall webworm moth. Pond: mist drifts west; turtles dimple the surface.
Crows and jays particularly noisy; chickadees and titmice unusually quiet. A flock of four jays, keep to themselves, eat caterpillars and katydids in roadside aspen. Vireo sings in the hardwoods, slowly and deliberately. Pauses between phrases seem too long for a red-eyed, too short for a blue-headed. Maybe a Philadelphia vireo? The identical twins of not knowing: joy and frustration.
Juvenile broad-winged hawk lands in ancient, leaning aspen. The tree doesn't topple. Hawk looks at me and leaves, passes over wetlands, the slow road to Amazonia. A second juvenile broadwing, perched above a neighbor's driveway, stares down at gravel, waits with Biblical patience for a careless chipmunk. In metropolitan New York, space for migratory broadwings runs thin. One September, in the early seventies, when I worked at the Bronx Zoo, across Fordham Road, more than twelve-hundred pitched into New York Botanical Gardens, gathering in the hemlocks along the Bronx River. In the absence of thermals, the hawks moored along the river for several days, a haven for rats and mice. I ate lunch across the street, amid the metropolis of broadwings, the only time a migratory flock of ever settled in my immediate neighborhood.
Broadwings on the move, seep through Coyote Hollow. In a couple of weeks, they'll freckle the sky, passing over the fire tower on Gile Mountain, kettles above the Hollow. I'll celebrate. Broad-winged hawks: an annual event that happens despite pandemics, despite virtual elections, despite social-distancing, despite a collapsing postal service, despite a disregard for science, despite a denial of evolution, despite religious and racial intolerance, despite a ham-handed and transparently parasitic actor in the White House, who scoffs at environmental regulations, who denies climate change and favors prehistoric sources of energy, who doesn't understand that Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, the largest intact ecosystem left in North America, a bequest of the Ice Age, means more to caribou and polar bears, says more to me than golf courses or hotels. Bring on the lesson of the hawks, please bring on the hawks . . . tuned to the vestigial anthems of Earth.
Two coyotes rock the morning.
Bring. On. Those. Hawks!
Double hearts for this one Ted.