5:08 a.m. 38 degrees, wind S 1 mph. The valley lies pale under the fog, which temporarily leases Coyote Hollow, reducing visibility to a hundred yards, maybe less. From the front yard, forget seeing Ascutney, I can't see either the wetland or the lower pasture. Fog softens the edges of the barn, the trails, the stone walls. Titmice are especially noisy. Maidenhair ferns, brighten an otherwise somber woods, spread like lacy parasols that lean toward the road. A bigtoothed aspen, seventy-feet tall and near the end of life, leans away. More than two-feet thick at breast height, lower branches leafless and broken, upper branches barely in leaf. Losing out to maples in the struggle for sunlight. Aspen wood: soft, easy to drill, perfect for small-beaked woodpeckers, which provide excellent apartment-hunting opportunities for chickadees, nuthatches, and titmice. Fast-growing, short-lived . . . foreclosure imminent.
Flycatcher species outnumber warblers: five to four. Pewee in maples, least in red pines, phoebe in barn, great crested in hardwoods. An alder flycatcher on the edge of the wetland, enshrouded by fog, prepares for a give-away, repeating harsh mantra free-BEE, free-BEE, free-BEE. He gives away affirmation and assurance. Affirmation and assurance that the morning's fruits, low and mutable are ours to harvest at no cost, a spiritual food bank; all you have to do is get outside.
Fog devours everything. The landscape: swaddled, constricted, planed. The western rim of the wetland is vaguely visible. Binoculars, useless; turns fog into chowder. If four moose sat in the marsh and played pinochle, I couldn't see them.
How does the goshawk hunt when the lights are out?