6:31 a.m. 41 degrees, wind ENE 1 mph. Sky: half-moon above the marsh shines through a pastel wash, the pink and peach of a nearly cloudless sunrise; then the birth of several clouds, condensation points, some grayish-purple—everything in the transition to spring-time white and blue. Pockets of thin ground fog, the breath of night, slowly dissipating. Permanent streams: a pair of watery ribbons allows rock-hopping mink to reach the Hollow's eastern wall and the next valley, and eventually . . . my friend's trout pond, where he dines in solitude on the finest (and most expensive) fish in the neighborhood. Streams, both steady flows, the magic of summer, which sleeps as soundly as a woodchuck, has lost its evaporative clout. Wetlands: a half bowl of mist on the west end, east end clear. The western wall, a dark and jagged mix of evergreens, now softer and lighter in diffusing fog; more ethereal, less bleak . . . a simple illusion. Pond: lonely female merganser, brown-frosted crest, erect, a tomahawk-head, works the far edge, the mink's domain, diving, surfacing, circling, slipping back into the water with barely a ripple, feathers a tightly linked water repellent unit—rachis, barbs, barbules, hooklets—the original Velcro. Surfaces, again, a small crayfish clamped in her serrated bill. A shake. Two slaps against the water. And down the dark gullet, headed toward a bath of stomach acid and digestive enzymes. A slight current of mist drifts in from the marsh. A litter of milkweed seeds, like scraps of cotton, on the berm, the grass, the edge of the pond; peeling off the pods; sowing for next summer's monarchs, whose immediate ancestors now cross the Rio Grande, mocking the Wall and the international border, a leveraged migration built on last summer's milkweed.
DOR: a newt, tail still twitching, headed away from the marsh.
AOR: a pair of slugs
Absent from the road (and adjacent woods and marsh) robins, which must be dispersing across southern New England and the Mid-Atlantic states.
Three clusters of red-breasted nuthatches keep up their end of the vocal bargain, enliven the woods with lighthearted if colorless toots. In defiance of planetary law, one descends pine picking through the pleated bark; flicks a tuft of brown needles; on the hunt for insects and insect eggs, spiders and spider eggs. Finds something to its liking. And a second something. Claws on bark, a soft, scratchy sound like belly scales of home-bound rattlesnakes brushing brittle leaves.
The enthusiasm of chickadees. The whisper of creepers. The Twitter of crossbills. The sibilance of siskins. The morn of doves. The loquaciousness of jays. The jarring of crows. The thrill of a red-shouldered hawk that passes over the marsh, an afterthought of fall migration. Alive, alone, ambivalent, leashes in hand, the count goes on without me, as I straddle a thin line between rhapsody and despair, in the thorny desolation of November.