5:06 a.m. (sunrise, the same time as yesterday). 52 (ideal) degrees, perfect for sleeping on a mattress on the floor in a discombobulated house, wind W 1 mph. Sky: overcast, flat shadowless light (for the moment). Permanent streams: more pulse than flow, water levels dropping, drought tightening; intermittent streams reduced to necklaces of disconnected puddles, the perfect repository for mosquito eggs. Wetlands: from the inside of nearby alder, male yellowthroat chips nonstop. Black beak, an extension of the black mask, vivid against the yellow throat. Forehead band more gray than white. Chips released into a cool morning, beak barely opening. Yellowthroat follows me down the road, alder to alder, calling. Reluctant to leave. Perhaps, nearby, there's a nest wedged into the crotch of a twig. A bird answers. Two yellowthroats chipping, dry, sharp notes, a repeated duet that fades and stops when I pass out of their territory. Pond: female common merganser flies over the pond, quacking, muffled croaks like a mallard with a sinus problem; turns around and flies back. Circles the pond twice more and then lands next to a pair of hooded merganser hens. When I climb the bank, an atmosphere of crisis prevails; all three ducks flee west, croaks in tow.
Cool air holds deer flies and blackflies at bay. Not mosquitoes. Mobile and persistent, they commandeer my walk, darting around my head like kamikaze pilots. Swallows and swifts elsewhere. Bats on life support. I need rent-a-dragonfly—maybe three or four.
Thursday, June 10, the moon passed in front of the sun, a partial solar eclipse. I couldn't see the eastern sky and its half-hidden sun, but light in the woods ebbed, dawn idled, shadowless and eerie. Both sunshine and birds subdued. A few sang, mostly veeries and titmice . . . the songscape held hostage by an eclipse. A quieter world less driven by impulse, by a territorial imperative that on any other June morning would have rocked the woodlands and marsh, would have left me exalted. On the edge of the lower stream, thrashing, snapping, as though an ATV plowed through the alders. The dogs, leashes taut, faced the sound. Pandemonium. Less than a hundred feet away, a shadow congealed into a black bear, frozen mid-step, dark as obsidian, head big as a football, a shadow within shadows. We stared at each other. Then, the bear pivoted, hurdled itself through the alders and across the marsh. Dogs settled, leashes slumped, and I returned home to boxes piled high with a lifetime of detritus.
This morning, on the pasture fence, a pair of chipping sparrows; on the garden fence, a couple of brown thrashers (FOY). Birds stretch time. And for the moment, I surrender, moored to the sparrows and thrashers. Thoughts leach away. Deadlines dissolve. Packing put off, again.
"Deadlines dissolve". Excellent--let the "birds stretch time" and leave the boxes for the movers, while you take solo flight to your next nesting place, where you and the dogs will find new birdsong and pathways. Safe journey, when the time comes--