6:44 a.m. (sunrise one minute earlier than yesterday). 28 degrees, wind NNW 0 mph (road puddles glazed). Sky: pink striations across powder blue; humid, the air thick enough to denature Mount Ascutney, now a veiled smudge on the horizon. Permanent streams: upper, no change, no ice; lower, one tunnel of compact snow, otherwise open and rushing, gargling full-throated. At the moment, the lower stream carries much more water, much more freight than the upper stream, but sometimes dries up in mid-summer, its source(s) less dependable. Wetlands: snow is mostly gone. Runoff, deliver by permanent and intermittent streams, pooling in the center of the marsh, an ephemeral pond skimmed in ice, too thin to support a bog lemming; a transient flock of grackles skirts the eastern shoreline, heading north. Perhaps, to compete with the jays at my feeders. Pond: ice withdrawing from shore, inch by inch, elsewhere rotting. Song sparrow singing (my first of the year), a truncated version . . . Madge, Madge, Madge. Although there's plenty of water everywhere, apparently, there's no teakettle.
In the limelight: chickadees, titmice, and white-breasted nuthatches sing before sunrise, too busy to eat. Chase the sun out of hiding. Crows join the sunrise serenade, offbeat, loud, harsh, infused with annoyance. Mitered heads erect, blue jays in aspen honking, grayer than blue in the dim light. Two brown creepers, a couple, sing, call, chase each other around a maple . . . consistently higher like their voices. Robins calling and singing.
This morning, The New York Times online Books briefing ran a "time machine," a link into the past, in this case, the March 28, 1860, book review of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species. What a treat. What a newspaper. Here's the concluding phrase.
. . . flooding the age with the sunlight of science.
. . . the sunlight of science. We all bask in the glow, every chickadee and every crocus and every winter stonefly—one big family of life parading into an unimagined future. Science lights the stage. People, sadly, have set the tempo.
"the sunlight of science"--brilliant thought, but what comes to my mind is Plato's Cave, where the people choose their chains of darkness rather than moving into the light. Only when someone is patient and persistent enough to bring them out of the cave can they begin to be aware. Darwin was one a long line trying to help us into the sunlight--thanks for echoing Greta Thunberg's call to "listen to the science".