6:04 a.m. 61 degrees, wind SSW 3 mph. Sky: chameleonic clouds, thicky spun, blue-gray; banked by cotton-candy wisps; then, horizon to horizon transformation, ruffles and ridges; sunlight wanting; waiting to rain. Permanent streams: upper, making the most of what it has; lower, same as yesterday, shy and retiring. Wetlands: lushly colored under a pall of clouds and blighted sunlight. Pond: no mist; subtle ripples set off wondrous reflections; an impressionistic landscape, an inversion of foreground goldenrods and asters, background evergreens. Pondside catbird in a tangle of shrubs ceaselessly meows.
Unflagging red squirrels, up at dawn; a bumper crop of cones; clip and drop. Red-breasted nuthatches; yesterday a flood, today a seep; six or seven in the white pines, on trunks and thicker limbs; calling sporadically, picking and poking; part of a southbound wave that may extend, eventually, all the way to northern Florida. Every few years, when cone crops failed in Canada, nuthatches gathered along the outer beaches of Long Island, tin horns ringing in the dunes. A moveable feast for saw-whet owls and northern shrikes, which had traveled the same routes south.
A flock of red-eyed vireos touches down before the rain, uncharacteristically whisper. A pair of red-shouldered hawks calling, screaming, suspended on the warm, southern breezes, primary feathers finger the air . . . the calculus of flight. Hawk voices harpoon the morning. Chase each other, over the upper pasture and bramble patch, in and out of the aspens. One lands. Then, the other. Up, again, and out above the valley. Announcements and pronouncements, charged with meaning. For me, a tribute to September; for the adult, an edit of the unwritten rules of dependency. For the juvenile, an urge for the status quo. A lifeline flung. Feed me, feed me. I've been there . . . I understand the predicament.
Behind the barn door: the memory of bats.