Date: 8/28/25 6:09 am From: Ted Levin <tedlevin1966...> Subject: [VTBIRD] 28 August 2025: Hurricane Hill (1,100 feet), WRJ
5:55 a.m. (fourteen minutes before sunrise). Forty-one degrees, wind South two miles per hour, gusting to four. A few wispy clouds, shredded and frayed. Hints of pink and peach. Jupiter and Venus, still low in the east, although more separated than yesterday, fade. Then, vanish in the gathering daylight. River fog from both the White and the Connecticut, thick as whipped cream, north to Mount Cube and west toward Quechee. Across the White River, fog peels off, filling the creases on Dothan Hill, rendering the Hill into an atmospheric sandwich: one stroke low, the other above the beltline, with visible forest in between. Dothan's pine summit pokes through the fog like a bad hair day.
Sunshine in the meadow. Goldenrods and Jerusalem artichokes glow. Voice of finches and sparrows, sharper in cold air. Butterflies and grasshoppers, motionless, in their vegetative hangars. Crickets, mute as mud. Yellow jackets in an aerial nest hanging from the porch roof are still asleep.
*Department of Splendid Wayfarers:* Two Cape May and one black-throated green warbler in the front yard crabapple (more birds than fruit). Red-eyed vireos in the hardwoods, not as loud, not as determined, a goodbye song. Yellow-billed cuckoo calling (FOY). Ovenbird. Yellow warbler. Myrtle warbler. Common yellowthroat. Overhead, a great blue heron. Least flycatcher; eastern phoebe, on an electric line, tail pumping; northern cardinal, color of October, calling in the withered lilacs. The squeaky *lik, lik, lik *of a rose-breasted grosbeak.
*Usual Suspects: *black-capped chickadee; red- and white-breasted nuthatches; tufted titmouse; common crow, perched on the uppermost pine branch ... sunbathing. Blue jay and raven, locquacious, voices fill the hillside; brown creeper, one, and cedar waxwing, a small flock hunting autumn fruit; gray catbird; song and swamp sparrows; chipping and white-throated sparrows; purple finch; American goldfinch; downy woodpecker.
Hummingbirds, up and about by 7:30, visiting vine honeysuckle and feeders and dreaming of jungle warmth. Mid-air contortionists. Little streams of pee.
