6:17 a.m. (sunrise two minutes earlier than yesterday). 39 degrees, wind N 1 mph (barely a ripple on roadside puddles). Sky: peach wash in the southwest, lemon in the northeast, elsewhere immaculately clear, crisp, and very promising. Shreds of patchy ground fog rise from saturated earth spread through the marsh and pastures. Fog does not affect turkey histrionics; twin males perform in the lower field, a dynamic, strutting duo, lovers of lust—an audience of nineteen, primarily oblivious, scratch throw the matted grasses. Males dance and gobble, tails fanned like a card game, wings drooped and quivering. Automated dance steps. Permanent streams: less water, softer gurgles, background music for a gathering chorus of songbirds. Wetlands: fog, the master landscape illusionist, screens evergreens, lightens reeds, turns a bright sunrise wonderfully barbarous, transforms drumming pileated and ruffed grouse into Jungle Grammys nominees. I freeze in place, absorbed by the mechanical sound . . . disparate rhythms roll out of the evergreens, rhythms that Max Roach would have appreciated. Pond: no ice, no ducks. Unconsolidated mist vanishes just above the surface. Two green frog tadpoles and a crayfish idle in the shallows. Hooded merganser, wings whistling, arrows into view, prepares to land, then sees the dogs and me, abruptly changes trajectory.
Last night, post-sunset: turkey troop performed in the open woods; three woodcock danced, one silhouetted by tangerine light; robins sang in the dark. Peepers and woods frogs chorused in vernal pools. Conspicuously quiet, barred owls, somewhere in the darkening woods; very likely, one high in a tree cavity incubating four round, white eggs, while the other waited for a flying squirrel, a white-footed mouse, maybe a preoccupied woodcock. (Many years ago, in Dutchess County, New York, I found a woodcock's knitting needle on the floor of a horned owl nest.)
This morning, pre-sunrise: sapsucker (FOY) calling and drumming, a stuttering beat, woodland Morse Code, lots of dots and dashes and pauses, and then meows like a cat with a head cold. Jagged geese flocks, back and forth between the Connecticut River and Lake Fairlee, precede their voices. Robins perch in bud-swollen maples, hurling songs against the morning.
Three hermit thrushes (FOY) join winter wrens, spinning mist into music, turn my world inside out. Arrived last night after crossing vast and undifferentiated airspaces out of the Southeast, silent confidants of alligators and moccasins now stake claim to the outcrops and matted forest floor. The original Pied Pipers. Winter wrens and hermit thrushes compose unintentional duets. Vicariously enriched, I linger on and on and on . . . listening to grace notes long enough to forget, for a moment, that I haven't left home in thirteen months.
Thank you for writing so vividly about spending your evenings with the turkey troop show-offs and the sky dancing woodcocks, and starting your days to the tunes of hermit thrushes and winter wrens, and sharing it all with those of us who go to sleep to the sound of honking taxis and wake up to the same. 🙏🙏🙏
"Vicariously enriched"--great phrase, and what your writing gives me. I'm suddenly aware of how you include so many sounds along with what you're seeing--especially the sounds of birds. You and my friend Patty are the only two people I know who live in magical places, where the primary sounds AREN'T from cars! I call her home Nirvana--she and her late husband loved birds as you do, and her feeders are a sight to behold. Thanks for sharing your sights and sounds!