5:08 a.m. 63 degrees, wind SSE 2 mph. Sky: thickly fogged, condensing on leaves and dripping; sounds like rain. I walk inside a cloud, where treetops are indistinct and green grades toward white. Spiderwebs hung with dew. Permanent streams: alive and well after yesterday's rain; flowing but not like April or May. Intermittent streams: seep and puddle. Wetlands: as though peering through chowder; opposite shore eclipsed by fog. Pond: a mist machine; surface smooth.
Red-eyed vireos sing with mid-May intensity and persistence, everyone else turns the volume down. Neighborhood warblers vocally withdrew; only ovenbirds and chestnut-sided still singing, the ovenbirds loudly. Two tanagers, high in the oaks, carry on. Even though they're adorned in neon scarlet, there's no chance I'll see them; I can barely see the tops of the trees.
Deer flies little hollow tubes of hunger, desperate to be filled—gorgeous rainbowed eyes and large transparent wings with dark bands. All the better to find me. Like mosquitoes and ticks, females imbibe blood to make and provision eggs. Her bladelike mouth slices through the skin, an anticoagulant keeps the blood flowing, and a spongy labrum laps it up. Males have weak mouths, sip nectar, and eat pollen. Growing up on Long Island, I faced greenheads, the coastal version of the deer fly, big emerald eyes, and even bigger appetites, which added a kamikaze element to adventuring in the salt marsh or fishing on a windless Great South Bay. The jumbo version of the deer fly is the horse fly, big enough to hit with a shovel, and a constant companion in photography blinds in the Everglades.
I need to commission a dragonfly (or two) to hover above my head, to tether to my binoculars; I'd send it across the morning to sweep my personal space clear of deer flies, to squelch the buzz of mosquitoes. Unfortunately, the parade of dragonflies that paroled the wetlands left after the beaver decamped, leaving me behind slapping, pinching, swearing.