6:04 a.m. 51 degrees, wind WNW 5 mph, treetops in motion, sounds like cars on a dirt road; the stutter and slur of leaves; passage of a cold front followed by gentle northwest wind, a recipe for migration. Sky: no ground fog; a refreshed atmosphere, an invigorating sunrise; long, slender cloud across the south shaped like a blue whale, colored like a blue whale; beyond the whale-cloud tufts and patches, wooly white, brushed by pale rose; everywhere else bright and clear . . . on a morning like this, fifty years ago, I would have been saluting the candy cane-colored Fire Island Lighthouse, binoculars in hand, watching the vanguard of hawk migration, mostly kestrels, merlins, and sharpshins; rarely an Arctic peregrine. (In the late sixties, before Heinz Meng (SUNY New Paltz) and Tom Cade (Cornell University) pioneered captive breeding and hacking, native peregrines were extinct east of the Mississippi; victims of pesticides, upwardly mobile food chain assassins.)
Permanent streams: upper, a rippling current; lower, rebounded; transporting freight into the marsh. Wetlands: a shaded bowl, pale to saturated color; mostly greens, browns, yellows, grays; mid-marsh, the lone dead pine, limbs pruned by time, waits for a hawk. Pond: coffee-colored waters driven by the wind; two hooded mergansers driven by me, skitter across the surface, takeoff, pitch into the marsh.
An unwary junco walks me down the driveway. Turkeys in the lower pasture gorging on cold-stunned grasshoppers, gobbling; jays, sharp voices on thin air, converse in the oaks; yanking green acorns. One pewee; mourns a season fading; gives hope to the next, which lurks dreamlike just below the surface.
Sparks of color, red and yellow, smoldering leaves . . . the seeds of autumn in the air, the trees, and high overhead on wings of southbound birds, whose voices like rain spill out of the night sky; drift by day through my familiar landscape; shards of sunlight in the east, the same sun and half-hidden moon that will greet them in jungles and islands far, far away. I believe in things wild and free, in the urgency of life, in vital messages carried on the wind.