Date: 3/24/25 6:16 am From: Ted Levin <tedlevin1966...> Subject: [VTBIRD] 24 March 2025: Hurricane Hill (1,100 feet), WRJ
6:38 a.m. (seven minutes before sunrise; six minutes after a dark cloud of
juncos scratched through frozen and compressed leaf litter and gathered in
the ample, front-yard crabapple, limbs thick like the legs of a Steinway).
Twenty-three degrees, wind East-southeast five miles per hour, gusting to
fourteen. Lines of tiny hail balls, arranged and rearranged by the wind,
streak the road. Sky: gray and damp, twilight prolonged; descending fog
obscures most of Smarts Mountain and erases all of Moosilaukee,
forty-six miles to the northeast. The quarter moon veiled. No sign of the
sun, either ... a totally flay gray heaven waiting for snow, which arrives
before 7:00, small-flaked and straight down. One afternoon late last week,
my outdoor thermometer reached seventy, fifty-six degrees warmer than
yesterday and forty-seven degrees warmer than today. For the past two
mornings, I've had to retrieve my down mittens from the bottom of the
hamper. As Mark Twain famously said, *If you don't like the weather in New
England now, just wail a few minutes.*
*Annals of Departure: *Three neighborhood robins sing at daybreak, seven
minutes before sunrise. Saturday's legion of robins rushing through the
meadow upright and disorganized have moved north. So have the clouds of
American goldfinches that emptied my feeders last week. A handful lingers,
males slowly gathering yellow. No red-winged blackbirds. No grackles or
cowbirds. I haven't heard a golden-crowned kinglet in a week.
Ten minutes later, at 6:48 a.m., flowering in lilac, cardinal, lipstick red
and full of beans, leans back and sings, face black as an N-95 face mask.
(Remember those?)
Winter wren singing in the gloom (FOY). Song sparrows in the weeds.
Woodcock flushes from roadside gulley, earth softened by running water—the
only spot in the vicinity soft enough to probe. Tufted titmice toss vocal
darts. Female hairy woodpecker on the sunflower feeder (a bird couldn't be
sloppier); juncos and goldfinches and a red squirrel gather below the deck
for the largesse.
*Connubial Bliss Department: *Chickadees chase around a sapling maple. Both
nuthatches are singing. Juncos trilling. Crows pair off. The world turns
internally green. Robin visits the shed and inspects the shelf. Owls
dueting. Pileated drumming. Mourning doves chummy.
Barred owl, framed by hemlock branches, rests after an all-night song fest.
Two crows stop to pester the owl., which bobs and weaves, eyes wide, as the
crows pass too close—no contact (yet).
