Date: 10/31/25 8:09 am From: rachel west <rjwest68...> Subject: Re: [VTBIRD] 31 October 2025: Hurricane Hill, WRJ
ted, I loved this "walk thru the woods" with you today!
thank you!
I would love to join you on a morning walk one of these days, if you are
open to company.
rachel
On Fri, Oct 31, 2025, 9:30 AM Ted Levin <tedlevin1966...> wrote:
> 6:58 a.m. (twenty-six minutes before sunrise, the second latest sunrise of
> the year—tomorrow's the latest.) Forty-eight degrees, overcast and pouring
> rain. Umbrella in hand, binoculars zipped inside my raincoat, dog home and
> warm, I trudge uphill under the spell of rain—the rat-a-tat-tatting—the
> rhythm above my head. No highlights. The banks and skyline across both
> rivers, gone. Erased by moisture—mist, fog, rain. The summit of Hurricane
> Hill? Reduced to a suggestion, an overexposed black and white print.
>
> Birdless landscape (at the moment), so I focus on the elbow of a twig, a
> kink in an otherwise horizontal maple, where a raindrop swells, sags, then
> lets go like the bottom falling out of an overstuffed grocery bag. Only the
> shell of the drop remains. One witness is enough ... I move on.
>
> The sun, hidden behind rain clouds, brightens the eastern sky, the frosted
> lightbulb effect. (You know it's up there. You can't see it. But the world
> lightens by baby steps.)
>
> 7:34 a.m. seventeen crows fly through the gloom, northwest, quiet and,
> perhaps, contemplative.
> 7:39 a.m. lone raven barks, first avian utterance of the morning.
> 7:46 a.m. three mourning doves fly across the road and settle into a
> leafless maple on the edge of a meadow. Noisy flight draws my attention,
> 7:58 a.m. pileated laughs (a private joke?), then flies across the road. A
> sharp bird, pointed at all for ends, blinker wings flashing.
>
> Robins and a single bluebird strip (well-rinsed) winterberries off a
> roadside shrub. Juncos and white-throated sparrows in the meadow,
> dispersing raindrops, gathering seeds. One white-crowned sparrow, abundant
> along the Colorado River, a rare visitor to Hurricane Hill. Of course, I've
> never seen a white-throated sparrow in sage and rabbitbrush.
>
> Myrtle (yellow-rumped) warblers and golden-crowned kinglets drift through
> an aspen, inspecting the crotches and tips of twigs, the last remaining
> leaves, sunbeam yellow. Kinglets hover. Warblers flit.
>
> Back home by eight o'clock, chickadees, titmice, and both nuthatches busy
> themselves on the feeders and in the woods, back and forth storing
> sunflowers amid the raindrops. One soaked gray squirrel.
>
