6:59 a.m. (desperate for Eastern Standard Time), 43 degrees, wind NW 5 mph (another ideal day to migrate). Sky: a gray pall with a wedge of clarity above the marsh that opens as I watch. Low clouds, silver highlights, pushed southeast by the wind; high clouds pushed by a counter-current head northeast. A cosmic criss-cross. Permanent streams: refreshed by rain gurgle all the way home; a soothing melody. Wetlands: somber and sober, much like yesterday sans rain. Pond: two mergansers bolt, both first-year males, a rippling memo across the dark water.
Although I hear both robins and red-breasted nuthatches, the numbers are down, again. Waves of birds coming and going. Blue jays rule the feeder—a male cardinal, a rare treat.
Overhead, a raven screams, tearing holes in the sky. Above the naked limbs, I see him black against the blue and white, a commanding bird, bigger and heavier than a redtail: a barrel roll, a patented maneuver—a big-brained bird, a Mensa, demonstrating the joy of flight. During the summer of 1980, on my honeymoon along the shores of Hudson Bay, I watched a pair of ravens steal eggs from a whimbrel nest. While one raven drew both whimbrels away from the nest, the other stole an egg. Easily duped, whimbrels never caught on. Ruse repeated four times . . . until the nest was empty. Teamwork and planning.
Comeback birds: Perhaps, on the heels of coyotes. Or the regrowth of woodlands. Or both.
In the spring of 1976, on an ornithology field trip, I visited a remote raven nest high on a cliff in southwestern New Hampshire, at the time, the only known nest in the state. Today rarely a day passes that I don't see or hear one. They nest on the nearby Fairlee Cliffs, and one winter, several years ago, more than thirty roosted in a pine grove on the north end of the Hollow. Besides New England, ravens have returned to northern New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and down the spine of the Appalachians to South Carolina. In the New York metropolitan area, they've nested on water towers and along stretches of remote Long Island beaches, on buildings in the Bronx and Queens; in the Chelsea section of lower Manhattan, one was spotted eating a bagel.
Sunlight rinses Robinson Hill. The last leafed-out aspen glows a deep, vibrant yellow, commandeers my attention . . . Until eight geese call down.