11:27 a.m. 64 degrees, wind SSE, 4 mph. Sky: clear blue. Standing in the middle of the wetland. Blind channels and pockets drying. The shallowest already dry or clogging with gem-green algae, closing in from the edges. Behind me, to the northwest, a great pyramid where a palette of greens rises like the tide upslope to the summit, still reddish-brown with tiny oak leaves.
Yellowthroat plays by pandemic rules; obeys governor Scott: wears a mask in public and self-isolates on an island of sweet gale. I walk to him, slowly, not watching my feet. Sink to my knees in a mote of unconsolidated muck, a bird's way to enforce social-distancing. Safe and sound, yellowthroat keeps on singing. Now, watching a bittern watch me. Birding on an organic trampoline, as out of place in his world as he is in mine.
A pair of solitary sandpipers (FOY), on their way north, work the edge of the main channel. Trusting and silent. Too busy foraging for aquatic insects and wood frog tadpoles, which hatch in the heat. Within twenty feet. No need for binoculars. Dark back, speckled. White eyering and pale gray-legs legs, the color of aspen catkins. After getting my fill of birds I rarely see, I leave them to probe and pick along the margins of a drying pool, just across from an antediluvian turtle, the size of a kitchen sink.
A green frog hops on folded reeds. A painted turtle slides off a log. A swamp sparrows trills. A hen wood duck flushes; then, a male mallard. I stand for a while, drinking in the early afternoon. My time alone bestowed upon me by a pandemic. When the thumb of fear lifts, wrote Mary Oliver, mother of wild verse, we are so alive.