Gloomy sunrise, with a cloud snagged on the treetops, leaking rain. A titmouse takes advantage of a lull in the chorus to hype his own claim. A tanager’s plucked string.
May 5, 2023
The cold, wet weather has lifted at last! The sun is fulsome and the bird calls glossy, even lubricous. An ovenbird and a Carolina wren sing back and forth, forest to meadow.
May 5, 2022
Clear and cool. A blue-winged warbler forages in the crown of the almost-flowering crabapple, his song like the wheeze of an ancient bellows.
May 5, 2021
Agog at the intense green of a deciduous forest at leaf-out in the rain. The soundtrack: wood thrush, red-eyed vireo, least flycatcher.
May 5, 2019
Rain. A black birch at the woods’ edge may regret its timing, shaggy orange catkins making it look like the most Victorian of lampshades.
May 5, 2018
Black-throated green warbler. I fetch my chair from the creek where the storm blew it. High over the neighboring valley, a killdeer’s cry.
May 5, 2017
When the rain finally slackens off, I can hear a vireo, goldfinches, the catbird, a train horn, and the throaty roar of a well-fed creek.
May 5, 2016
A catbird in his dapper gray drives an indigo bunting from the yard. Two migrant white-crowned sparrows beside the road load up on grit.
May 5, 2015
A hollow oak dead for 30 years has finally collapsed, its fragments piled next to the stump like abandoned clothes. The first few raindrops.
May 5, 2014
His call sounds much farther away than the lilac, this black-throated blue warbler in his elegant plumage, hiding in the only leafy shade.
May 5, 2013
The leaves of the tall tulip tree at the wood’s edge are now as big as babies’ ears. A squirrel cries plaintively from its crown.
May 5, 2012
Thin fog. A flicker is excavating a den hole in the dead elm on the other side of the yard, his head almost disappearing into the tree.
May 5, 2010
So clear, it almost hurts: so blue, so green. And the yellow warbler singing what birders always hear as “sweet-sweet-sweet-I’m-so-sweet.”