Date: 11/3/25 5:34 am From: Ted Levin <tedlevin1966...> Subject: [VTBIRD] 03 November 2025: Hurricane Hill (1,100 feet), WRJ
5:58 a.m. (half an hour before sunrise). Twenty-four degrees, wind
South-southeast two miles per hour. Bright, clear sky, color in the east,
mostly rose and lilac with hints of lemon, leaking through the summit of
Hurricane Hill—crystalline stripes framing the sober tones of trees.
Eventually, color turns butterscotch, as sunlight fingers the crown and
pours down the trunk of roadside maples ... ephemeral but ethereal.
Across the valley, White River fog, a congestion of moisture, halfway up
the dark hills, like the thick white stripe down the back of a skunk. As I
walk, the fog dissipates, thins and rises and vanishes. Never reaching the
summit of Hurricane, an isle of visibility on a frigid morning.
Red-bellied woodpecker in the shadow of hemlocks, an icy chatter. Hovering
golden-crowned kinglets search for overwintering moth caterpillars in the
pleated bark of a hemlock. Six mourning doves, wings hissing. Evening
grosbeaks, ringing trills; three over the road, big heads, tails short as
though lopped in a paper trimmer. An American robin, reasonably tailed,
passes from one winterberry to another. And the usual suspects: tufted
titmouse, black-capped chickadee, red- and white-breasted nuthatches,
white-throated sparrow, dark-eyed junco, blue jay—ubiquitous and
long-winded, screaming in the woods, the air, the deck ... blue troubadours
pacing sunrise. State-of-the-art calls.
Conspicuous by their absences: American crows (nowhere to be seen or heard
... a *very* rare morning indeed), slogging it out elsewhere across a
frosted, gothic landscape.
