6:56 a.m. 57 degrees, wind ESE 5 mph. A throwback to deep spring sans leaves, flowers, the cacophony of peepers, and the sweet songs of thrushes. A bipolar climate: 25 degrees on November 25, 18 degrees on November 19. Water on the move, everywhere. Sky: overcast with dazzling highlights; the Earth a pearl suspended inside the curvature of a heavenly quahog shell. Luster and shell dissipate as I walk . . . a reappearance of blue. Permanent streams: fuller, louder after a rainy day, at times torrential. The eastern hillside, a visible circulatory system, an anastomosis of water-swollen creases and folds, most flow into the two permanent streams, the hills twin aortas. A few reach the marsh on their own. Standing on the culvert above the lower, fuller stream, I feel a thread of cool air, swept downhill with the current. Wetlands: the heart of the valley; everything flows into the marsh, including cooler, heavier air. Western wall—a sawtooth serration of pines and spruces and firs and hemlocks—not as somber as yesterday. Shades of green, alive and well. Inside the green, an owl, a soft bird, a voice that floats through the night. Flies like a moth eats like an eagle. Owl called in the rain yesterday afternoon, from its evergreen throne. Pond: a surface do-over, melted. Ice-embedded otter sign erased in an Etch A Sketch moment.
AOR: an earthworm . . . an earthworm, a thin, brown string bean of a worm, on December 1.
Chickadees and a titmouse under the barn overhang pluck spider eggs out of tattered webs. Blue jays bury acorns and sunflower seeds. Raven, a gravel-voiced bird, black under a mother-of-pearl sky. A downy woodpecker on the suet.
And Ernie, a forlorn bobwhite, runs around the front yard, a plump windup toy, geographically out of place. A native of southern pine forests recently burned, and early-successional woodlots, from Cape Cod to Mexico. Ernie escaped from a breeder, crossed from one valley into the next, avoiding goshawks, Cooper's hawks, red-shouldered hawks, red-tailed hawks, bobcats, fishers, coyotes, red and gray foxes, mink, and long-tailed weasels. Arrived under the bird feeder in my front yard two months ago. Spends his evenings in the raspberry patch. Weary of me, but not afraid.
I made Ernie a bed, a pile of hay in an old wooden apple crate. Looked perfect. An ideal roost, I thought. Cozy. Shielded from rain, faced south. What more would a quail want? Apparently, something. An inclination for the bluster of late autumn. Flanked by a legion of bramble wands. Ernie roams the front yard in the company of gray squirrels. Survives on black-oil sunflower seeds spilled by careless jays. Avoids the heavy feet of turkeys. Once or twice a day, a bob-white whistle takes me back to the charred ground of a longleaf pine woods on the coast of Georgia, newly burned, tendrils of smoke rising into a blue sky. Ernie, an incomprehensible bird that keeps his own counsel, alone in an alien world.
On the stone wall, this morning, bathed by a southern breeze, unsupervised, out of place, Ernie . . . could be Ernestine.
I love this story of Ernie/Ernestine!