5:13 a.m. 38 degrees, wind NNW 1 mph, on life support. Sky: clear and rose-petal in the south; pale blue in the north. Shallowest intermittent streams reduced to thumbprints, long and narrow; deeper ones whisper, their current barely visible. Mist rises out of the pond, dissipates in the cool air; veils the wetland softens color . . . the valley's gentle exhalation. Barred owl, close by, its hollow, rhythmic voice echoing off the hills. Coyote Hollow, again and again and once again, the embodiment of Zen stillness. For the moment, there is no place I'd rather be.
Awakening woodland a fount of life: wood thrush; chestnut-sided warbler; common yellowthroat; black and white warbler; American redstart; winter wren, picking up the musical slack; house wren, animated as ever; red-eyed-vireo; blue-headed vireo; eastern phoebe; least flycatcher; great crested flycatcher (FOY), not seen (or heard) since pre-COVID jungle rambles in Costa Rica; white-throated sparrow; song sparrow; tufted titmouse, especially loud; black-capped chickadee, especially admonishing dee-dee-dee-dee; American goldfinch, yolk yellow; American bittern; wild turkey. A handful of peepers.
Female sapsucker quietly works maple for the fifth day in a row. A pair of wood thrush chase each other through streamside shrubs. One pauses to sing. Theodore Roosevelt, from his North Shore home on Sagamore Hill, declared, "Our most beautiful singers are the wood thrushes." He should have traipsed across the Long Island pine barrens with Whitman, where the poet and the hermit thrush had intimate dealings. At the moment, here in Coyote Hollow, it's all wood thrush; hermits having secreted themselves away in the cups of elaborate ground nests, warming pale blue eggs, maybe, feeding helpless, grotesque-looking chicks.
A chestnut-side warbler croons in aspen. Bird and canopy touched by first rays of sunlight, everything below in shade. Picks inchworms off delicate leaves then he announces . . . pleased, pleased, pleased to MEET-YA. Charismatic microfauna—white cheeks, yellow crown, chestnut sides framing an otherwise immaculately white belly and breast. Warbler glowing in infant light amid infant leaves . . . the sweet spot of the morning.
How fortunate I am to wander out my front door into a beckoning landscape. Here living things have meaning in terms of what they do. Rhetorically, Yeats wondered, How can we know the dancer from the dance? Had been standing with me this morning on the edge of this dirt road, in this little valley in east-central, Vermont, one of ten thousand—a random valley, culled by me only because I live here—he might have written, How can we know the light from the bird?