5:29 a.m. 59 degrees, wind SE 1 mph. Sky (and Earth): ceiling to floor fog, chowder-thick and without highlights or texture; visibility less than a hundred feet; the barn swaddled in vapor. Bowl and doily spider webs pepper the lawn, dew-covered and glistening. Permanent streams: limp long. Intermittent streams: ribbons of mud. Wetlands: far shore veiled by fog; jagged treetops softened; the outline of distant hills erased. Pond: just above the surface, the mist becomes fog. It's night all morning; October without the color. Milkweed pods open. Monarchs can't be far behind.
DOR: red eft
AOR: red eft, florescent orange bright enough to cut through the fog; sufficient to mark a runway; easily spotted and avoided by road-warrior robins that patrol the furrowed shoulders.
The fog has no bearing on vireos, which pour their voices into the soup, singing like there's no tomorrow. House wren effusive and creative. Three dueling veeries, all close to me and each other, their voices slide down the musical scale, arresting and enlivening—a fog song transforming my walk into a mobile mediation. Dogs far less interested in listening than I tug their leashes. Pileated drums in the fog; a lucid, inescapable rhythm, the morning tempo. While foraging in the alders, yellowthroat quietly but sharply calls pik, pik, pik, pik.
Last night, I fell asleep listening to a yellow-billed cuckoo, deep, guttural, hollow like a bittern, and well-spaced. This morning, I awoke to a black-billed cuckoo (FOY), triplets of cu, cu, cu, also hollow but softer, more haunting than yellow-billed. Both species lay an egg every five days, and the duration from egg to fledging is a mere seventeen days—one chick on the verge of fledging, another on the verge of hatching, simultaneously. Siblings are possibly unknown to each other, well-spaced like the Chaplin children. Thoreau applies to cuckoos as well as to eccentrics: If a [bird] does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.
Beside hairy caterpillars, cuckoos track both the thirteen-year and the seventeen-year periodical cicadas, abundant and predictable, but geographically and temporally spaced across the eastern deciduous forest. I follow cicada outbreaks on the computer—2020, southwestern Virginia and adjacent West Virginia. Cuckoos follow a higher power.