6:42 a.m. (sunrise two minutes earlier than yesterday). 45 degrees, wind SSE 3 mph. Sky: middle-tone gray, Zone 5, saturated air, tendrils of mist rise from every crease and fold in The Hollow, morphs into frail, treetop fog, clouds without ambition. Permanent streams: both swollen with snowmelt and last night's rain, in a churning hurry, far more ambitious than the mist, which lingers in the canopy, auditing the water cycle, receiving only partial credit. Wetlands: three days of sixty degrees, frozen tundra recast into a waterlogged sponge. Broken reeds a darker, wetter shade of brown. Pileated in the hemlocks drumming, one volley per minute (or so). Another, on the eastern apron, answers—a percussive duet—stereophonic drumming. Then, from the hillside, a laugh, long, loud, and wild: wuk, wuk, wuk, wuk, wuk. Jungle movie sound. Pond: surface puddled and wasted, ice pulling farther back from the shore. An otter could have his way with the pond.
West along the marsh, where the land flattens, a red-shouldered hawk perches in the crown of white pine, one of the tallest trees in the flats. Hurls his voice against the thick air, four or five screams, clear and squealing, kee-aw, kee-aw, kee-aw, kee-aw, kee-aw—a vernal zealot. Then, like the pileated, pauses for a minute. Let's his voice sink-in. Gives jays have a chance at an interpretation. Hawk, a feathered knot, bolt upright, a dark, oval silhouette against the gray. One March, I found red-shoulders mating on a stout, horizontal oak limb off the driveway. I stopped the car, rolled down the window, and watched an incarnation of spring. Hawks nest in the main crotched of a big tree, halfway up. A basket of sticks, decorated with sprigs of hemlock and pine, used over and over unless appropriated by horned owls.
March 1976, Putney, VT: I watched a pair of red-shouldered hawks nesting in a giant yellow birch. Twice each week, I'd climb nearby hemlock and look across a streambed, down into the nest, a tolerant parent looking back at me, assessing my intentions. Sometimes, I'd bring a friend. We'd eat sandwiches in the hemlock while the mother hawk eviscerated a gray squirrel or a bullfrog. No one seemed to care.
Jay honks. Two blasts. Another jay answers; also two honks. Both birds carry on, and in the background (now), the hawk screams, four times (again), the conductor, orchestrating a valley in seasonal upheaval. Winter into spring, the linchpin of the year, all clocks set to urgency.
Clouds without ambition ❤️