5:56 a.m. 66 degrees, wind NNE 3 mph. Sky: bright moon in the east hollowing out, horns showing; wispy clouds, some with a hint of peach; ground fog defines streams, river, and marshes; a graceful sunrise, could have been included in In Wilderness is the Preservation of the World (1962), Eliott Porter's romance with New England woods. Permanent streams: upper, pinched and silent, but still on the move; lower, a puddle with a vague pulse, more ghost than current; retreats below ground well before the road. Wetlands: fog thick in the middle, thin on the edges; a top-knot of moisture. Pond: more haze than mist; a suggestion of current, shallowest of furrows; blame the breeze.
DOR: brightly colored carnage. A scarab beetle, orange and black. A red eft; struck down on its way to a new life in the marsh. Everywhere, on rainy nights, amphibians move. In the 1980s, on the first warm, rainy nights of April, a series of vernal pools on either side of a well-travel Norwich road invited disaster. Every year, I'd join a group of friends to escort spotted and Jefferson salamanders to their spawning pools. Charismatic megafauna of the temporary pools, gorgeous, vulnerable, and slow. We'd save dozens . . . maybe more. Dozens more were killed. Rainy night amphibian rescue: crossing-guards or underpasses; otherwise, learn the Mourners Kaddish Yitgadal v'yitadash sh' mei raba . . . Which a student once recited, on a rainy south Florida night, when I backed over a pig frog.
AOR: robin, calling and pecking, hops up a neighbor's driveway. A pair of crows. What holds their interest? Not a roadkill. Sunday evening, Thetford Center, an adult turkey vulture on State Road 113, fed on a fresh roadkilled skunk. Zipped up my windows against the odor, which, unfortunately, accompanied me home.
A steady drone of crickets. In the woods, here and there, a drizzle of caterpillar poop, tiny pellets bounce off cushioning leaves, what biologists call frass, spills out of patches of maples and ashes; a digestive storm; woodland fertilizer. Sounds like rain. Looks like rain . . . not.
An agitation of red squirrels rushes around the white pines, harvesting green cones. Both nuthatches call. One pewee. One red-eyed vireo (I linger). Jays vocally robust: honking, hollering, screeching.
In the absence of waxwings, I break for blackberries, tangled and taloned canes hung with fruit, refreshingly juicy, raven black. One for me. One for each dog. One for me. Succumb to berries, eat until stultified . . . and then eat some more. Just when virtually everything else hits the pause button, blackberries catch my attention . . . and work their mysterious spell.
I have already expressed how much I love your posts, so now I have three questions that I have not been able to answer from reading each day. 1. What is AOR? 2. What is DOR? 3. You posted a few days ago about bears and your bird feeders. You still have bird feeders?! Just asking...