Homeboy at Home During Coronavirus
November 18, 2020: Coyote Hollow, Thetford Center, VT
6:41 a.m. 21 degrees, wind NW 10 mph (an ominous blow, trees swaying). Sky: murky, mostly a 6 on Ansel Adams' Zone System chart, a shade of gray leans more toward white than black, Zone 1 and 2 highlights in the east, bright enough for sunglasses. Permanent streams: soft dancing light, more waltz than horah, ice on the ends of emergent sticks. Wetlands: flushed by unabated wind, loud enough to hijack the voice of nearby chickadees, everything else hunkered down. Pond: ice-sheet blooms in the south cove, shards and panes unite and spread north, sealing off a third of the pond, not quite ready for hockey. Two blue jays overhead, one follows the other. Both scream. A fracturing of the morning.
Red squirrels, slowed down by the wind and cold, apparently sleeping in. Not brown creeper, which slowly, methodically wanders up the trunk of a dead, pole-size pine. Checks crevices for spiders, cocoons, and insect eggs. Slender, curved bill scrutinizes bark like water-witcher scrutinizes the ground, probing, probing, probing. Tail, woodpecker-stiff, braced against the tree. Around and around, always up, nuthatch in reverse, a corkscrew search for food. Brown creeper: a dainty, delicate bird. Looks like a piece of loose bark. Colored like a dried leaf, brown and streaked, light underneath; ochre band on wings. Sounds like an errant hearing aid, high and thin, barely audible, in the vocal range of kinglets and blackburnian warbler . . . louder than a thought, quieter than a twittering beech leaf. Compared to blue jay and chickadee's social appetites, the creeper is usually a loner, an unorthodox little bird that keeps to himself.
Brown creeper flits from one tree to the next. Wanders up and around . . . now I see him, now I don't. Now, I see him again. Nearby, four chickadees in flux, dashing and calling, investigating everything that isn't a brown creeper. Stonewall. A mat of frozen leaves. Branches. Pine needles. Twig tips. I stick with the creeper . . . it may be months before we cross paths again.