5:18 a.m. 70 degrees, wind S 6 mph. Sky: an Etch A Sketch pad that begins with a run of low, puffy, socially-distanced clouds that drift boat-like into the north; high white sheets above them hold their position; everything begins to pinken and lighten with sunrise, and then disperses and reforms; a mutating atmosphere cleansed by the wind that sets trees swaying and moaning, and holds mosquitoes at bay. Permanent streams: struggling but nevertheless inspired by yesterday's showers; upper, a faint gurgle and noticeable current; lower, puddle extends through the culvert, under the road, before receding below the surface and flowing unseen into the waiting marsh. Wetlands: somber; the wind, gestures, pulsates across the reeds as though across a flat, featureless prairie; a refreshed world in perpetual motion. Dew settles nowhere. Pond: wind sets the tone; surface still; surrounding trees a conniption, branches flap as though attempting to take off. Late white ash seed drop. Goldenrod and jewelweed bloom. A deer snorts, loudly; dogs on alert.
DOR: ruffed grouse, brown phase with a broken neck; most have shocked the hell out of the driver. Green frog, small and pulverized.
AOR: robin; adorable red eft, barely an inch long and vividly orange. When I was seven years old, on a Jewish retreat in the Catskills, I caught a red eft. My father thought it was a lizard. Said it was poisonous. On the toxicology front, he was right, but I convinced him I'd lunch with the family at Grossinger's and not put the salamander in my mouth. I kept the red eft in a jar with wet leaves for the three days; released it, teary-eyed, just before we headed back to Long Island.
Birds in the woods: pewee and red-eyed vireo, the only Neotropical migrants that have something to sing about; crow, robin, and a flock of jays kvetch on the edge of a clearing. How do treetop warblers pick caterpillars off flapping leaves?
Birds at the feeders: four hummingbirds, all in overdrive; a dozen mourning doves, wings swishing; purple finches; and goldfinches, calling and singing, have the pastures to themselves. I haven't seen either evening- or red-breasted grosbeak families in several weeks. Insects in the woods keep chickadees, titmice, and nuthatches from making little more than a cameo appearance.
Behind the barn door: little brown bats, the party of five, canceled their reservation and moved elsewhere.
In preparation for Tropical Storm Isaias, I've been filling gullies in my driveway and daydreaming about a possible fallout of tropical seabirds. Maybe brown booby. Or sandwich tern. Or gull-billed tern. Maybe a lonely sooty tern swept out of the Caribbean, entrained in the cone of the storm, heads this way. Long Island, which stretches west to east for one hundred twenty miles, was a land net; every hurricane that battered the Island brought displaced birds; more than once a frigatebird or tropicbird. On occasion, gypsy birds disembark in Vermont. In mid-May 2006, grounded by heavy weather, approximately seventy north-bound red- and red-necked phalaropes, more a sprinkle than a fallout were grounded on ponds and lakes in Vermont and New Hampshire.
A minimal number to be sure scattered over nineteen thousand square-miles . . . but how lucky was I to see a bird that summers with musk ox and winters with blue whales in my home town?