5:28 a.m. 57 delightful degrees; wind ENE 0 mph. Sky: separating sheet of clouds in the north; clear with a wash of peach across the south. Woods twilit; meadows and pastures full of warm light. Permanent streams: mute, barely moving. Wetlands: wisps of mist rising into the air; absorbed and gone; across the marsh, webworm tents visible, increasing and expanding; as if in celebration of the impending bounty of hairy caterpillars, a yellow-billed cuckoo calls three times then stops. Pond: surface calm and brown; rolling mist in a hurry to go nowhere; periscoping painted turtle, yellow stripes against brown water.
DOR: American toad and recently transformed green frog
AOR: Robin looking for roadkilled insects
Robin in charge of tunes, singing everywhere, chase each other around the treetops like kids on the playground. Stop to scold a red squirrel, which facing down the trunk, annoyingly flicks its tail. Calling titmice, chickadees, and white-breasted nuthatches hint of things to come. Shy tanager, although more substantiated than the Lost Dutchman's Mine, hides in the green sweep of the canopy, singing and singing, a seasonal curtain call . . . a farewell solo. Red-shouldered hawk cries, lancing open the morning . . . all the world listens. How could you not? Moved to mimic, a blue jay, decent impressionist but no Will Ferrell, covers the red-shouldered but fools no one.
A knot of five little brown bats, two days in a row, roosting behind the barn door.
For much of the summer, once the day heats up, I’ve watched a pair of turkey vultures float over the wetlands, gently rocking back and forth, feathered kites adrift. They'd dip over the marshland, rise over the valley's western rim, and disappear behind a bank of trees. I assumed that birds searched for food, flesh pinned to hide; maybe a deer carcass or a raccoon; perhaps a mouse that could be swallowed whole like an aspirin. One April, eleven years ago, while counting rattlesnakes in the Bull Run Mountains of northern Virginia, I startled a turkey vulture, hidden within a jumble of boulders. The bird took flight, ascending through a hole in the canopy, circled a few times, and then perched halfway up a nearby oak. Silently, and with good reason, the vulture followed my every move. In the boulder cave from which it had emerged were two large, cream-colored eggs, each decorated with a disarray of brown, Jackson Pollack spots and squiggles as if the artist had stood above them with his dripping paintbrush.
Later that summer, while scaling the western rim of the Hollow, my boys, attracted by sibilant whispers and the smell of rotting meat, found another vulture nest. Inside a stone alcove, two nearly full-grown juvenile turkey vultures stood upright and portly, as gray as twilight and as fuzzy as a faux fur pillow; a downy white shawl around their shoulders and necks. Almost two-feet tall, they were the quintessential adolescents: upset, awkward, bitterly protesting, but preparing to soar.
Yesterday, from the confines of my porch, I watched a vulture cut lazy circles in the sky, fingering the wind above the fertile stretch of marshland, preferring the air to the ground, looking and sniffing for a carcass. Borne on a breeze, hatched amid a fortress of rock, the very essence of a hot summer day. Enough to make me forget the washed-out driveway needs repair.