Date: 11/3/25 7:52 am From: Ted Levin <tedlevin1966...> Subject: Re: [VTBIRD] 03 November 2025: Hurricane Hill (1,100 feet), WRJ
Wow! Very cool. I've gone outside several times over the years thinking I
left the car keys in the ignition and the door open only to find a jay
mimicking the electronic beeping of my Toyota.
Thanks, Charlie. I love these stories!
On Mon, Nov 3, 2025 at 10:27 AM Charlie Teske <cteske140...>
wrote:
> I recently heard a tale from a Korean War Vet who, as a member of the
> Signal Corps, was sent to Georgia to learn to send Morse Code messages.
> Due to the summer heat that practiced outdoors, and when they stopped for
> cigarette break, the blue jays would screech the code back at them from the
> pines. Early state-of-the-art.
>
>
>
> On Mon, 3 Nov 2025 08:34:18 -0500, Ted Levin <tedlevin1966...>
> wrote:
>
> 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.
>
>
