63 degrees, wind S 3mph, not enough to hold mosquitos at bay. (I marinate in a denim jacket for that.) Sky: overcast and bright; clouds on the move. Permanent streams creep and whisper; channels narrowing to within a heartbeat of puddles. Red oak catkins: thin, stringy, and clustered, hang like confetti from leaf axils. Compared to zaftig catkins of birch and aspen an oak's are anemic. The tree itself: a popular restaurant, either sit-down or take-out. Red oak acorns keep all winter (unlike white oak) and feed the masses: crow, blue jay, and squirrels bury them for the future; turkey, grouse, bear, deer, gray fox, raccoon, and small rodents beyond naming eat them on site. While working on a master's degree, I unzipped fishers that were caught during the New Hampshire trapping season; their stomachs jammed with acorns, not with porcupine (or cat).
The slurred whistle of eastern wood pewee (FOY) straight out of the oaks. Like that of chickadee and white-throated sparrow, a pewee's song easy to mimic. A poignant whistle, PEEaweee, all the more poignant in late August when nearly every other Neotropical bird has gone home.
Best bird: red-shouldered hawk, scanning the marsh from a pine limb. Flushes. Warblers: black-throated blue; black-throated green; chestnut-sided; yellowthroat; Nashville; black and white; yellow; ovenbird. Although it may not be the most numerous warbler, ovenbird by far the most conspicuous; calls attention to itself . . . like Hermione Granger impatiently waving her hand in class. Tanager singing in red oak, framed by scraggly catkins. If a rose-breasted grosbeak sounds like a robin that's taken opera lessons, a tanager sounds like a robin with a pack-a-day habit.
In 2019, approximately fourteen thousand pairs of bald eagles nested in the continental United States. In New York alone, the number approached five hundred pairs, more than the entire lower forty-eight states had in 1963 when DDT had brought the birds to their knees. The eagles’ success can be traced back to June 16, 1962; the day The New Yorker published the first of three installments of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, which spawned the modern environmental movement amid shoals of apathy. I remind myself of this as I brush mosquitos away from my face.