5:08 a.m. 27 degrees, Wind SE 3 mph. Cloudless. Steamless. Frost in the wetland. Half-moon east of center sky; above a duckless pond. In transit: three geese, honking; one loon, lit by the morning sun, tremolos echo across the valley. Is there a more haunting call on a chilly May morning? Turkeys: gobble, strut, mate. Today, in the lower pasture, upslope from alders that crowd north end of the wetland. For a moment I could imagine the males, after two months of procreating, exhausted, piled along the shores of the lower pasture, washed up like spent salmon. They are my new yardstick for stamina.
Worth a slight digression: Yesterday afternoon, walking along the snowmobile trail, I flushed a hen, literally underfoot. An incipient nest? (Elsewhere, turkeys have already begun to hatch. On Mother's Day morning, I found an evacuated eggshell in Norwich.) Further along the trail, three bushel-size depressions . . . turkey dust bathes, wallow-sites in the sandy earth where birds asphyxiate feather mites. Last week, as I walked through my living room, I noticed the young, glum male at the feeder—the one who struts to no one in particular. He jiggled, left to right, wings akimbo and tail fanned, released a cloud of dust, a veneer of which coated the stonewall.
Morning of the ovenbirds, which must have ridden into Coyote Hollow last night on the southeast breeze. Twelve singing along my three-quarter-mile route. Several in full view; close at hand on horizontal branches mid-way up in trees. Screaming. Hollering. Reiterating. Ovenbirds look and behave like thrushes, which are silent, again. Home, shortly after the sun crests the eastern rim of the valley. Six ovenbirds in the front yard mix with the hoi polloi. One picks up a small numb earthworm. Slurps it down. Another probes around the blueberries; displaces oak leaves. The rest mingle on the lawn.
A reminisce: Several years ago, while radio-tracking rattlesnakes with a biologist on a ledge in the Champlain Valley, I found an ovenbird nest, a domed-over, grassy structure, not unlike a Dutch oven with a portal in front. The nest held five tan-colored eggs, heavily stippled. Several days later, all five hatched. Then, a week after hatching came a grimly fascinating peek into secret lives within a forest: the biologist found the radioed-rattlesnake, bolus in its belly, coiled near the threshold of the ovenbird nest. The nest was empty.
3:32 p.m. 54 degrees, wind NW 16 mph gusting to 20. Cumulous clouds in an azure sky. Looks like July, feels like April. Trees falling. An old, ill sugar maple, as wide around as my chest (42-long), fell across the road, mostly trunk with a single living branch.
Running the road: a Nashville warbler song (FOY) spills out of yellow birch.