Homeboy at Home During Coronavirus

March 29, 2021: Coyote Hollow, Thetford Center, VT

6:35 a.m. (sunrise five minutes earlier than last Friday, March 26th). 39 degrees, wind W 12 mph, a triumph of damp, mobile air. Sky: low ceiling, grayer than blue, thick air spitting snow, rounded, inbred flakes the gift of shapeless clouds. Permanent streams: water on the move, heavy rain begets heavy flow. Water rises above low spots in the bank, lapping at the edge of the woods. Even the roadside gullies join the chorus. Wetlands: impersonates pond, the main channel swollen, fed by every crease in the marsh. Full saturation, standing water everywhere. Does what marshes do, holds back floodwaters. No sign of mergansers, which could be anywhere cruising and diving amid the reeds, their world exponentially expanded. Pond: puddled and melting, ice retreating from the shore, translucent patch metastasizing and synapse thin, wouldn't support an opinion.

Red-shouldered hawk, a shrill scream pierces the valley. Crows and jays keep to themselves foraging in silence below the canopy. Titmice, woodpeckers, and doves quiet. Chickadees whistling, barely audible above the wind. Robins singing liquid phrases above the water.

Yesterday: more than one hundred robins in the upper pasture (none in the lower), all upright and dignified, stalking. Ground soaked, worms at the surface trying to breathe. Robins waiting, rushing, feeding, short burst of activity. Reminded me of sandpipers on a mudflat. 

Robins have perfect posture. No slouching. No slumping. Head erect, eyes forward, never contemplate their toes. My son Casey, the physical therapist, should consider the robin, the yardstick for posture-challenged birders (like his father). They don't lean like a dove or a junco, eyeing the ground around them. Robins are sturdy and straight, like a hawk on a limb, studying the pasture beyond their toes. Watching for a worm in the grass . . . then, a burst forward, and a short tug-of-war. A length of protein, one earthworm after another, caught and swallow. Several robins had bulging crops, interior shopping bags crammed with food. 

The whole pasture seemed in motion. I stood at the bedroom window counting. Ninety-seven. One hundred three. One hundred eleven. Too much action to be an accurate statistician.

Simply put, I watched a mob of northbound robins paused for the afternoon . . . and then on to Quebec or Newfoundland or the shore of Hudson Bay. To the hem of the tundra. North America's most familiar, most widely distributed songbird, but not the most numerous. At an estimated population of only 320 million, the robins fall short of dark-eyed juncos . . . whose population is estimated to be 630 million.

No longer a harbinger of spring, some robins remain all winter, gorging on freeze-dried fruit, mostly winterberries, sumac, and bittersweet. This morning, neighborhood robins call and sing, struggle to be heard against the machinery of the wind. Pasture robins had moved on, took the red-eye north beyond The Hollow. Essential migrants flying into Canada, crossing that once permeable border . . . accentuating my confined perspective.