Date: 2/23/26 5:36 am From: Ted Levin <tedlevin1966...> Subject: [VTBIRD] 23 February 2026: Hurricane Hill (1,100 feet), WRJ
6:17 a.m. (eighteen minutes before sunrise). Nineteen degrees, wind North six miles per hour gusting to nineteen. Monochrome sunrise. Cloud ceiling, shapeless and low, scrapes the New Hampshire skyline; two linear clouds below the summit of Smarts Mountain, which rises like an island into a gray sea. Night cedes to daybreak, ever so slowly.
Overnight dusting, an inch (no more). Evergreen limbs sag, weighed down by Friday's wet snow. A serried fortress of green and white blocks the wind. Doves inside a spruce murmur. Juncos inside a cedar, twitter.
Deciduous limbs, an iteration of white on brown. Squirrels stay put.
6:23 a.m. crow above the White River caws.
6:37 a.m. raven grunts.
6:39 a.m. Tuned to light, not weather, inside an open-field rhododendron, leaves curled against the cold, crown rounded and capped in snow, a single chickadee ... singing. The resilience on a bleak, colorless morning.
Eventually, titmice and nuthatches join the drone of woodland sounds.
*What a Difference a Day Makes: *The primacy of a clear morning. Yesterday, seventeen bluebirds in the crown of a maple framed by the fireworks of sunrise, which highlighted their bellies and made the snow on nearby spruces blush. A flock of cedar and Bohemian waxwings and a lone pine grosbeak raid a patch of highbush cranberries. Bits of red fruit littered the road and stuck to their beaks. (Waxwings fed like my grandkids, and wore what they consumed.) Hairy and downy woodpeckers on dead limbs, simulcasting, the drumbeat of exuberance, one louder than the other. Pileated called in flight. Blue jays, everywhere and noisy. Purple finch. Goldfinch. Brown creeper, whispered. And the wild genus of a barred owl, an all-morning visit from George.
