5:06 a.m. (sunrise one minute earlier than yesterday). 70 degrees, wind SE 1 mph. Sky: cloudless, soupy, foggy, muggy, sticky, leaves drip, thunder rolls, lightning tempered by low-hanging clouds. Permanent streams: last night's downpour fed the atmosphere but not the tributaries; susurrus of the upper stream drowned out by energetic vireos; lower, mudbank as prominent as yesterday. Wetlands: world stops at the far edge of the marsh, shoreline shrouded in mist, a mere suggestion of trees; green frog joins chorus of treefrogs and peepers, piping and twanging; strafed by mosquitoes, blackflies, deer flies, and no-see-ums, I’m challenged to stand still; spilling and shedding blood in Coyote Hollow. I’m an involuntary donor to the Woodland Red Cross, a reluctant enrollee in the neighborhood food chain. The benefit of my contributions, however, are not immediately apparent. Pond: insects follow me down the road, a hungry, noisy crowd of disparate wings and proboscises. My walk a mobile hemorrhage. Hidden in the irises, bullfrog belches. Whirligig beetles, ephemeral drafts of surface calligraphy, dashing around and around and around and around. I'd happily watch them longer, but I would be drained dry.
DOR: red eft, an orange dot on dark brown road.
AOR: female junco bill crammed with dog fur (Tenaya and Shadowfax donate to another nesting season; last year they contributed to a chickadee family). Pair of juncos in distress, rapid-fire chips and clicks. Their distraction performance drives us from a nest we never suspected.
Department of excitable woodpeckers: pileated emerges from an auditory slump, drumming and screaming; flicker hushed and hidden inside the woodland umbra, a shadow within a shadow. Red-shouldered hawk out of obscurity, barbed voice flung across the valley, flies circuits in the fog. June 2021, more black-throated blue than black-throated green warblers; ovenbirds quieter, settling inside domed nests, under grassy roofs; chestnut-sided warblers, yellowthroats, red-eyed vireos, and veeries dominate the airwaves.
The other day, my quenchless thirst slackened for a moment. Under the roof of the barn porch, dogs in the shade go ballistic, non-stop barking. I leave my desk, expecting to see the UPS truck. But no truck. No car. Not even a hot-air balloon from the Post Mills Airport, drifting languorously over Robinson Hill. Just the slow-ebb of mid-morning. Then, twenty feet above the front yard, a juvenile black bear materializes, tenuously and tentatively, in a red oak, clinging to the trunk like the Wichita linesman. Dog-faced; claws long enough to open mail; Popeye forearms. Black beads for eyes, nubbin for ears, and a nose that twitched and read the layers of our world . . . a language understood by the dogs, their barking non-stop and edgy.
Bear shimmied down the oak and ran like Seabiscuit across the lawn, hind legs pushing, front limbs reaching. I stood, riveted, and whistled a tune out of the 1950s. And remembered my coonskin cap and Davy Crocket lunchbox.
"Davey - Davey Crocket - King of the Wild Frontier... he kilt him a bear when he was only 3." Something like that. Nice for that bear to stop by and sear another layer of memory onto Coyote Hollow for you. A good omen perhaps or a farewell. Add it to the owner's manual for the next inhabitants perhaps. How does it feel to leave such a cherished place where every sighting builds the encyclopedic collection of memories? We sold a house and instructed that the little woven basket for the Phoebe nest would be due before mid-March and the hummingbird feeder expected before first of May, etc.