5:12 a.m. 53 degrees, wind N 1 mph, barely enough to move a coronavirus. Sky: a rose-flush across the south; a sheet of wrinkled clouds with highlights across the east; clear everywhere else. Wetlands filled with horror-film ground fog. Pond fog rolls southeast. In the absence of an otter or of turtles, I consider pine needles. Deposited and marshaled by the wind, needles spiral outward in the manner of concentric Etch-a-sketch swirls or a sonogram of a veery; becomes my morning mandala . . . eventually to be rubbed out by the very force that put it here. Smoking columns of fog climb out of cloistered valleys, white on green. Red flowering raspberry in flower; petals on the darker side of red. Iris went to seed. Male flowers of white pine spent, an organic litter ready to invigorate (if we ever get rain). Two bullfrogs call. Green frogs silent. It’s been an almost frogless summer in Coyote Hollow. I cherish the big garden toad, the only one I've seen this year.
A hermit thrush offers a musical overtone to the more mundane voices of late June. Veery song spirals out of the fog. The drumbeat of a pileated echo across the valley. A Nashville warbler hops into view, eye-level on alder, sings twice. Female yellowthroat, off the nest and actively gathering caterpillars, ushers Nashville warbler out of her immediate neighborhood.
Annals of the front yard: evening grosbeak chicks are more or less sunflower seeds reconfigured. Already the size of their parents, chicks camp near feeders, toes grafted to cherry branches, wings drooping and quivering, bills agape. Harried parents stuff shelled seeds down their throats, one after the other. Songbird gravy train. There's never enough.
Annals of morbid amusement: using the lilacs for cover, immature red-shouldered looms large and grim. Mourning dove panics. Dove escapes, leaving behind some down and two tail feathers, and me . . . breathless.
Phoebes fledged barn nest; hang out in red oak by the barn door. Parents bring them moths, mostly white.
Department of Misplaced Accolades: In the spring of 1804, in a cave in Mill Grove, Pennsylvania, eighteen-year-old John James Audubon tied a silver thread on the legs of five nestling phoebes. Hailed as the father of bird banding for the past two centuries, Audubon was given credit he may not have deserved. In the 1830s, many years after he ringed the chicks, Audubon wrote that the following spring two of the five had returned to Mill Brook wearing silver bracelets. In a recent article in the Archives of Natural History, a journal published in Edinburgh University, a Pennsylvania biologist, who had studied the artist's journals, reported that in the spring of 1805, when Audubon had said he saw the ringed phoebes, he was in France. Besides, a recent and astronomically larger philopatric study demonstrates that less than two percent of banded phoebes return to their natal neighborhood . . . not the forty percent Audubon claimed.
I'm not too surprised. Audubon got timber rattlesnakes wrong. He painted one with round pupils and a set of teeth in the upper jaw. And, in 1827, while lecturing in Edinburgh, he claimed a Louisiana rattlesnake chased a gray squirrel through the treetops, in the fashion of a limbless gymnast; and that the snake eventually killed the squirrel by constriction, not an injection (pure fiction).
Phoebes, less concerned than I am about their place in the annals American ornithology, beg for moths.
Your writing is remarkable. I am a writer but your descriptions seem to come from another place. Unique and beautiful. I just discovered you on Daybreak. Thank you. Have you writing anywhere else?