5:00 a.m. 39 degrees, wind S 1 mph. Aspen leaves fluttering; oaks and maple oblivious. Sky: lines of darkish clouds in the southwest rose-tinted; clean and blue in the north . . . but not for long. Dawn sky kaleidoscopic, morphs by the moment; clouds elongate, disassemble, disappear. Pond sheds heat; thin tendrils of mist rolling southeast, emaciation of moisture, and then gone . . . called back to the sky. Mist in the wetland even thinner; beyond subtle softens colors on the far shore like looking at the morning through a screen door; directly over the wetland, just above the treetops, a lost cloud stalls . . . not much substance either. But, on the other hand, the whole visible course of the East Branch of Ompompanoosuc substantiated by mist.
Overly expressive birds: red-eyed vireo and ovenbird. More subdued birds: least flycatcher, black-throated blue warbler, Nashville warbler, chestnut-sided warbler; winter wren, veery, hermit thrush, swamp sparrow, white-throated sparrow, song sparrow. A turkey, a little late to the procreative game, calling and strutting . . . preparing for the 2021 draft. A distant loon wail haunts the morning the way nothing else can.
A family of motormouth blue jays in and out of the hardwoods; chicks begging and gesturing, parents braced for days of provisioning, screaming what may amount to avian profanity . . . their emancipation a week or more away. Blue jays are the single most important distributors of oak trees. Or, said another way, ten thousand years ago, the range of eastern and midwestern North American oaks—northern red oak, southern red oak, swamp red oak, scarlet oak, white oak, swamp white oak, black oak, post oak, pin oak, chinquapin oak, chestnut oak, willow oak, overcup oak, basket oak, bur oak, shingle oak, blackjack oak, scrub oak—expanded northward out of refuges in the deep and unglaciated south because of jays; jays ferried acorns in bills and crops, hungry and impartial foresters, reshufflers of the continent's vegetation. Disseminator of acorns, jays plant them here and there, one at a site, just under the earth, often miles from the parent tree. Gray squirrels, which get much too much credit as foresters, bury their harvest deeper and in piles close to the parent tree.
Many years ago, Les Line, then the editor and chief of Audubon, ran a series of photographs of a blue jay standing on the rim of a Baltimore oriole nest. The jay firmly gripped the edge, leaned far down into the stocking nest, and pulled out a hapless chick, which I have always assumed was fed to its own mob of fledglings. Some people just don't like blue jays. They think they're rude and aggressive. But what they really are is intelligent, resourceful, gregarious, loquacious, supercilious, bellicose, adaptable . . . more or less, just like us.
I really enjoy my blue jays. They are so interesting to watch. They have societies and are extremely intelligent. I hope they survive the 5G wifi that is coming out. I hope we do also.