Date: 4/12/25 6:05 am From: Ted Levin <tedlevin1966...> Subject: [VTBIRD] 12 April 2025: Hurricane Hill (1,100 feet), WRJ
6:11 a.m. (sunrise two minutes earlier than yesterday). Twenty-nine
degrees, wind North-northeast one mile per hour, gusting to seven. Sky:
uniform blue-gray, no breaks of light. The sun is up, but you'd never know
it. Snowing. An inch of small, wet, sticky flakes, straight down. A world
glazed, every branch, every twig. Hemlock limbs sag. The warmest patches of
the road are snowless, otherwise slushed and puddled. Everywhere else ...
white. Hurricane Hill, an out-of-season greeting card.
Wood frogs and peepers are silently and patiently below the water's surface
... waiting. Spotted and Jefferson's salamanders bide their time beneath
the snow and leaf litter. Also, waiting for that miraculous warm, all-night
rain that triggers their short spawning trek to vernal pools, a journey two
hundred million years in the making.
Yesterday's eastern towhee either moved to silence or absence. A flock of
cedar waxwings (twenty-plus) passes high above the meadow heading east, a
shapeless bunch of songbirds mute as marmalade. Flight vanishes into the
density of weather.
Robins look natty in a snowstorm, brick red bright against the white.
Everywhere and cheerfully singing. Background vocals: chickadees
(bedraggled and dripping), white-breasted nuthatches, red-breasted
nuthatches, song sparrows (returned in abundance while I was Colorado),
phoebes also moved to silence. Crows, ravens, and jays keep to themselves.
Turkey feeds in the meadow; no histrionics.
George, the neighborhood barred owl, has been busy with domestic chores and
has relinquished his daily backyard vigil. Even the snow hasn't lured him
back to my steady procession of floundering red squirrels below the bird
feeders ... yet.
Pileated takes apart a sugar maple—top of the tree excavations—five oblong
holes, two more than a foot long and several inches deep—a carpet of wood
chips under the rug of fresh snow.
