5:11 a.m. 67 degrees, wind S 0 mph. Sky: weakly overcast, breaking up, with peach-colored accents. Permanent streams: flow slowly with more a murmur than a gurgle. Wetlands: without fog or mist. Pond: water level much higher than yesterday; culvert a steady drip; a trace of haze that vanishes a foot above the surface. Mosquitos and deer fly out in force; convene on the back of my hands and neck. Black-eyed Susan blooms. Mountain maple keys are reddish-green and ready to take off.
DOR: a small, pulverized songbird.
AOR: American toad nicked by a car, destined to be a DOR. I move it into the ferns, a final resting place; song sparrow gathers grit; three slugs attempt to cross before the sun catches them; red eft, neon orange; newt, recently transitioned from eft-stage, an orange shade of olive, heads towards the wetlands.
One dependable ovenbird shouts in vain for a teacher, teacher, teacher. Reliably, every red-eyed vireo non-stop enthusiasm. If I could find a vireo nest, I'd have something to consider other than their mind-numbing song. A brown creeper wanders up a maple trunk; tail pressed to bark; stops to feed; stops to call, high and thin seee, seee. When Roger Tory Peterson ceased hearing blackburnian warblers, he knew it was time to see an audiologist. My clear yardstick, the brown creeper, confirms I don't (yet) need hearing aids.
A miraculous and providential conspiracy: a micro fallout of yellow-billed cuckoos. Four commandeer the valley, one so close to the house I look for him. No luck. Calls, well-spaced coos, more profound and not nearly as sad as a mourning dove. In late summer, when knots of webworms appear in black cherry trees, Coyote Hollow hosts a few black-billed cuckoos. These, however, are the first yellow-billed cuckoos I've heard in the valley.
Outer obit of natural history: a yellow-billed cuckoo occasionally lay eggs in the nest of other birds, most often in a black-billed cuckoo's—an unplanned adoption for the hosts, an identity crisis for the chicks—and then moves on with chilly indifference. A facultative brood parasite. Not an obligate brood parasite like the much-despised cowbird. When a cuckoo does build a nest, it's a flimsy platform of sticks, a rudimentary home; daylight shows through the bottom like the side of an old barn.
Yellow-billed cuckoos pass through the valley, pause to daven, and then gorge on hairy caterpillars that graze in the treetops. Swallowing caterpillars, one after the other, spitting up balls of irritating hairs, hairs that discourage other species of hungry birds. Cuckoos, callus-throated and opportunistic, follow the tides of an unpredictable food source across the deciduous forests as nomadic as buffalo hunters. Yellow-billed cuckoos likely gone tomorrow, off to greener pastures, maybe never to return in my lifetime. A masterpiece of evolution, yellow-billed cuckoo, the occasionally undevoted parent, mirrors the complication of life. If a seemingly odd behavior benefits a species, the trait perpetuates itself in the next generation. If the specific response is deleterious, the habit discarded like yesterday's coffee.