Date: 12/6/25 6:14 am From: Ted Levin <tedlevin1966...> Subject: [VTBIRD] 06 December 2025: Hurricane Hill (1,100 feet), WRJ
6:49 a.m. (nineteen minutes before sunrise). Nine degrees (fifteen degrees warmer than yesterday), wind South-southeast two miles per hour, fussing to four. From super moon to absent sun. Yesterdays' cold (and gorgeous) solar bloom has been replaced by today's chromatically dull sky, much middle tone gray, with a dash of blueish-white. An upside-down and rumbled topography: inverted hills and valleys. Dark with light lines.
Six inches of Tuesday snow and an inch of Wednesday and my world became a *tabula rasa*. Now, the signatures of spike-footed deer criss-cross the road and woods, and a fox, a dainty feet. Squirrel trails stitch neighborhoods together: the meadows, the woods, the front yards ... my deck.
Crow choir, then twelve crows. Black below gray, headed west. No bunching. Strung-out unlike the siskins in a backyard red maple. In contrast to the crows, an ambivalent barred owl passes just above the maples (and the siskins), over road, and then disappears into the hemlocks ... silent like snow. A pileated screams, a private joke, over and over.
*Twenty-feet from stardom*: black-capped chickadees, tufted titmice, American goldfinches, dark-eyed juncos, red- and white-breasted nuthatches, golden-crowned kinglets, and a belly-aching raven high above the crown of the Hurricane Hill. Five turkeys in single file, look both ways, then cross the road (no histrionics). Hairy woodpecker: *peek, peek, peek; *then demurely taps an aspen.
*Annal of Surprise: *Common loon pointed south, wailing below the textured sky. Pushed by the Arctic cold front? Ice closing off northern lakes? A determined flight. Heads for the restless ocean, the gray chop, which it might already be able to see.
