5:12 a.m. 62 degrees, wind N 0 mph. Sky: taut, a skin of featureless clouds, horizon to horizon like the head of a drum. Air: thick with moisture, waiting to rain. Haze shields Mount Ascutney and every ridgeline beyond the Ompompanoosuc. Visibility less than a mile. Feels like rain. Looks like rain. I head down the road, the long, lonesome road, accompanied by Dylan's eternally useful line, You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows, which applies to weather, as well as to politics.
Black cherry in bloom but chestnut-sided warbler doesn't avail himself of the floral arrangement . . . sings elsewhere.
Barkless, crownless, and woodpecker riddled, the old maple snag along the edge of the road collapsed, chips on the ground like prayer beads. I had stuck my fist in its oval craters . . . often beyond my wrist. Now, a gift for northern red-backed salamanders and ring-necked snakes, which will convene beneath punky, rotting wood. My favorite boyhood salamander, red-backed salamanders come five hundred to the pound, the most abundant vertebrate in a northern deciduous forest by both weight and numbers. Calculations based on statewide surveys indicate possibly fourteen billion live in the leaf litter of New York, about fourteen thousand tons of salamanders, a primary source of energy flow throughout the northern deciduous forest. According to Al Breisch, retired New York State herpetologist, in deciduous woodland, like Coyote Hollow, red-backed salamanders weigh twice as much as songbirds and about the same as small mammals.
Volume turned down on red-eyed vireos. (It's a very good thing salamanders can't sing.) Hermit thrush offers an abridged version of its song. Adler flycatcher keeps pace with the morning. By the time I return home, the morning has morphed into song: a cacophonous blend of flutes, twangs, belches, pips, tweets, chirps, slurs, hoots, ga-lunks, whistles, caws, barks, peeps, buzzes, chides, honks, screams, quacks, croaks, rings, taps, drums. Two notes. Three notes. Piccolo melodies and pack-a-day phrases.
Everything makes music except salamanders—keepers of the leaf litter— deep in duff eating little worms.
Sight, sound and sense! I love how your last line almost always packs a punch.