6:54 a.m. 48 degrees, wind SSE 2 mph. Sky: a smooth, continuous cloud sheet, tucked and drawn tightly along the horizon. Permanent streams: leaf-clogged but moving. Wetlands: somber, a theme of brown, vague suggestions of green (except for alder, which still sports summer look). Pond: glass surface; without mist and mergansers. Pale, blue-colored asters bloom in the woods along the edge of the road; milkweed leaves turn yellow, some seedpods open; seeds beat down by rain clump on the ground, meadow dust bunnies; goldenrod flowers have gone by, dogs unwitting seed dispersers.
Department of broken records: red-breasted nuthatches' tin-horn toots fill woods. One hairy woodpecker, en route to my bird feeder, calls sharply from the oaks. I pause at the white spruce and search for golden-crowned kinglets. Instead, a ruby-crowned kinglet pops into view, bounces around the white spruce branches, and wings flicking. Nearby, in the alders, several red-breasted nuthatches join a mixed flock of chickadees and golden-crowned kinglets. Ruby-crowned kinglet moves from spruce to alder; mixes in the loose flock; a food fest, harvesting small caterpillars from the backs of green leaves. Ruby's crown, well hidden (I've only seen the crown when birds are agitated), but broken eye-ring and pronounced wing bars dead-give-away . . . and, of course, compulsive wing-flicking, and hyperactivity. Kinglets, I could watch them all day, jazzed and energized, animating a sober October landscape.
When Penguin Books published Eliot Porter's Birds of North America: A Personal Selection (1972), the coffee-table, large-format photography book—a world-class publication—included a photograph of a ruby-crowned kinglet (circa 1945) at its nest in the spindly crown of Englemann spruce. To get the photograph, Porter, the Ansel Adams of color photography, hired a cherry-picker to cut off the top of the tree, nearly one hundred feet off the ground. Day after day, the cherry picker lowered the crown and nest by increments, until the kinglet nest was at eye level. Without disruption, the kinglets eventually fledged chicks, and, from a ground-level blind, Porter got his landmark photographs.
My oh my, how times have changed.