Date: 3/23/26 6:25 am From: Ted Levin <tedlevin1966...> Subject: [VTBIRD] 23 March 2026: Hurricane Hill (1,100 feet), WRJ
6:31 a.m. Sixteen minutes before sunrise. Twenty-six degrees, wind south at
five miles per hour, gusting eleven. Flurries, river fog: erasing Hurricane
Hill, smudging the New Hampshire skyline, curtaining the borderland along
the White River—Jericho and Dothan hills, ghosted. Flurries fatten into
squalls of tiny, stinging flakes. They cling to trunks and limbs. They burn
my eyes.
6:38 a.m. A robin calls from the hemlocks, a crow answers from the sky.
6:45 a.m. Chickadee, titmouse, the first rough edges of song.
*On the Road to Obscurity*: white-breasted nuthatch hitching along the
maple’s trunk; pine siskin drifting with goldfinches; purple finch, a
sudden liquid warble from nowhere; dark-eyed juncos trilling (such an
obvious song when pine warblers and chipping sparrows aren’t around); a
lone pine grosbeak—heard, not seen—descending whistle threading the
meadow’s rim.
7:29 a.m. A garbage truck slews sideways across the road, damming morning
traffic: a boy headed to high school, a woman bound for work. The boy
snakes his pickup around the truck (barely). The woman waits out the delay,
patient for the sand truck. Robins, in chorus, oversee the snarl. Two
crows, too proud to gawk and already above the treetops, angle northwest,
reading snow, wind, and an ambiguous horizon.
*Eagle Cam, a Sign of the Twenty-first Century:* I visited the
Ottauquechee eagles yesterday afternoon. One sat in the white pine nest,
cackling, feathers darkened by rain. Two Canada geese stood on the ice of
Dewey’s Pond, honking. Five common mergansers and seven hooded mergansers
loitered around a bend in the river, beyond the eagle nest. Song sparrows
and robins flitted back and forth across the trail, landed, then scratched
through soggy leaves.
Cold rain, and when I’d had enough, I drove two miles home and turned on
the VINS eagle cam—now my screen saver.
Two views to choose from: looking west toward the river, or east toward the
still iced-over pond. I left the sound on. My office filled with honking
(geese) and cackling (eagles).
The image of the bird in the nest, contour feathers matted by rain, was
bright and tack-sharp. She, or he—I need them side by side to know who’s
who—rose, fussed with the egg (there did not appear to be two), then
settled down again to incubate. Off-camera, her (his) mate called. She (he)
answered.
Colors draining with the gathering twilight, the cam slipped to
black-and-white. Still, details stayed sharp in the infra-red light. I
watched the changing of the guard: one bird replacing another on the nest.
5:27 a.m. I turned on the computer and watched an eagle, bill tucked under
wing, sleeping, snow on its back. Peaceful, like every songbird or barnyard
chicken I’ve ever watched.
*H*ome from my walk up Hurricane Hill, both eagles on my screen, both
eagles in my head. One in the nest, the other on a supporting branch a few
feet off the rim. Their voices fill my office. They trade roles without
ceremony: one to the egg, the other to breakfast. I sit and watch them loop
the morning between us—pixel and feather, branch and computer screen, here
and there blurring into the same thin air.
