5:11 a.m. 50 degrees, NW wind 2 mph. An absence of a down jacket, ski cap, and winter gloves. Waning moon eclipsed by a blanket of high clouds, corner to corner, blue-gray, ready to release. Woodland and wetland: viridescent. Beech leaves unwrapped, tiny, delicate, vibrant. Sugar maple leaves open, flowers extending. Leafless shadbush, white-petaled, lights up the eastern rim of the wetland.
Last night, a Wonder World of Warblers? Not quite, not yet. I see one Nashville; hear four ovenbirds, one black and white, three yellowthroats, one black-throated green (FOY). A male myrtle visits a skirt of sapsucker holes; ring around a maple. Sips sap; punctuates meal with a burst of song. Pissed off woodpecker flies in, screams, the sound a cat might make if you stepped on its tail. Routs warbler, which vanishes into spring. Sapsucker, a more or less beaked dowser, goes back to excavating a network of tiny cavities around the tree; muted taps barely audible from twenty feet. Before long (I hope), a hummingbird will come to these same holes, drink sap and eat fresh culled insects that also came for sap; eventually, to select a personal sapsucker (this one?) and defend it from interloping hummingbirds. (Red flowers are in a very limited edition in mid-May.) Hummingbird and sapsucker engage in a one-sided relationship called commensalism that benefits one species while neither helping nor harming the other—like a coyote catching ground squirrels that exit the back door, while an oblivious badger, head in a hole, bores through the front.
A male rose-breasted grosbeak, eating maple buds, a study in contrast and simplicity. Like the old joke, What's black and white and re(a)d all over? For a birder, the answer would be grosbeak, not newspaper. Ivory-colored bill set in a black face; blood red breast smears white chest and belly (like a fingerprint, the unique extent of red identifies individual males); black back; white rump. Inner tail feathers: black. Outer tail feathers: white. Black wings with white blotches and bars. And he can sing, sweetly, long fluent warbles.
On the south end of the pond, a pair of house wrens inspects a cavity in busted red pine. Male sings, loudly; varying the pace between a typewriter—someone who can type—and a machinegun, an uninterrupted explosion.
Phoebes nest-building in the barn. Behind the nearby west-facing door: a little brown bat. Might be the same one I watched troll for insects above the upper pasture last evening. Twenty years ago, ten or twelve roosted behind the door. Now, thanks to white-nosed syndrome, one . . . a cause for celebration.
What makes spring so fascinating? Clearly, I grow tired of winter; yearn for pulsing life, for rich color, for warm weather, for voices in the night. Spring's arrival, though trending earlier and earlier during my lifetime, is a prolonged, unscheduled, unpredictable, uncompromising event. No two are ever the same. Spring is the hermit thrush, the virtuoso of seasons, inventive and breathtaking. I thrive on that variety and surprise, on the urgency of life. Spring in Vermont delivers in spades. And I'm home, watching.