6:01 a.m. 61 degrees, wind NE 1 mph. Sky: eclipsed by fog; leaves dripping, a muggy morning. Permanent streams: upper, fed by a thunderstorm, currently visible and audible; lower, reawakened, trickles home. Wetlands: foreground, colors muted; background, far shore a soft outline that, westward, dissolves into the density of the air. Pond: the still surface, the color of chocolate, generates haze, receives fog. Interrupted ferns wither; goldenrod going gangbusters.
Virtually every black cherry and most white ash hosts fall webworms. Tenement trees also include red oak, butternut, lilac, red and sugar maple, speckled alder, big-toothed aspen. And my sacred front-yard black walnut, which holds nineteen webs, some curled over stitch together neighboring twigs; hang like the ghost of laundry, threadbare and amorphous. Where are the cuckoos?
Except for a nagging catbird, the bird roster devoid of Neotropical migrants. Crows on a mission in the compost pile; jays everywhere and noisy. A mixed flock chickadees and titmice drift through the hemlocks. White-breasted nuthatches, shrouded in the thickness of the morning, wander down oak trunks, examining furrows in the bark; pause to feed and call. Goldfinches and purple finches on the feeders; seven mourning doves on the ground glean what the finches spill; an absence of hummingbirds.
Yesterday, a broad-winged hawk, mobbed by thrushes and robins stoically, perched in the open. Ignoring the impulse of songbirds, which hurled invectives at the motionless raptor, posing unflinchingly, as still as a statue, an impotent aerial hunter waiting to pounce on a toad or a garter snake, maybe a chipmunk. I once watched a northern water snake eat a green frog, and moments later, a broad-winged hawk flew by carrying a water snake, which trailed from its talons like a banner towed by a propellor plane—a simple food web. Thrushes and robins have little to fear from a broad-winged hawk . . . unless they're drunk on fermented cherries and behave like inebriated teenagers.
Coyote howls, a forlorn, fog-piercing emote that renders a dull morning less mundane. I'm hooked. An auditory rapture; fifty shades of wildness, one for every intruding thought in my head . . . I'm engulfed (for the moment) abidingly thrilled with an animal I can't see.
Can you talk about fall webworms in some way that makes their jarringly messy, spooky omnipresent nests more, if not appealing, at least appreciated?