Date: 5/27/26 5:19 am From: Ted Levin <tedlevin1966...> Subject: [VTBIRD] 27 May 2026: Hurricane Hill (1,100 feet), WRJ
4:42 a.m. (thirty-two minutes before sunrise). Fifty-nine degrees, wind
west-southwest three miles per hour, gusting to seven. An altogether
delightful morning, cool enough to keep mosquitoes at bay. The sky is
lightly textured, a loose assemblage of thin, orange-grey clouds, open and
airy, a heavenly pastel wash. Windrows and patches drift overhead like a
favorite pair of worn jeans on the line. Smarts Mountain, Mount Cube, and
Mount Moosilaukee stand out in sharp relief, dark blue islands on the
paling horizon, moored in a brightening sea of sky.
*Seasonal Queue*:
A) The second wave of wildflowers: columbine, starflower, and
Jack-in-the-pulpit. Fringed polygala (*Polygala paucifolia*), like Babe
Ruth, is a collector of nicknames: gay-wings, bird-on-the-wing, and
flowering wintergreen. Unlike Babe Ruth, it hugs the forest floor, small,
purple, bilaterally symmetrical. It looks like an orchid, gorgeous as an
orchid. If botanists classified flowers by looks, fringed polygala would be
an orchid. But, alas, it’s a milkwort, anonymous royalty in the understory.
B) Second wave of frogs: gray treefrogs are calling from the trees and
along the shoreline, bursts of loud, fast-paced chirps, not unlike the
excited voice of a red-bellied woodpecker, a percussive treble line in the
morning score.
The woods are a youthful green. The meadows are green. The world smells of
lilac. For the moment, Vermont is lush, as green as the Green Mountains
get, as if the hills themselves were taking a long, deep, contented breath
before the day begins.
4:56 a.m. First warbler, an ovenbird, screams from the floor of the forest.
Wakes up a black-throated green warbler. Then, a score of chickadees.
Titmice. Both species of nuthatches, the choir assembling by habit and by
heart.
4:58 a.m. Barred owl glides over the road and into the woods. Silent as a
stone. Disappears. I cannot believe the owl didn't graze a branch or
disturb the leaves. A big, blunt body shape-changing amid a weft of
branches, feathers and shadow weaving together. The calculus of flight.
5:01 a.m. Black and white warbler sings from a roadside branch. A
high-pitched, reclusive warbler. A tiny bird in jailbird stripes. Stops
singing, then, defying gravity, wanders up a maple trunk, picking and
pecking, a feeding niche shared with nuthatches but not other warblers, a
quiet acrobat on the bark.
5:07 a.m. Catbird, concert in a lilac. Perfumed performance. Scat-master of
the underbrush. Late spring mornings don't get better than this, when even
the shrubs seem to hum along.
*Department of Agitation:* At the top of the hill, just inside the hemlocks,
wood thrushes (definitely more than one) calling, explosive, staccato *pit,
pit, pit, pit.* I turn and look. Three wood thrushes dart around or perch
momentarily above a barred owl, screaming. Attracts a dive-bombing blue jay
and a chickadee. Owl, motionless, on hemlock limb. Expressionless. A
woodland stoic, carved from dusk. Eventually, enough is enough; owl bolts,
a reabsorption deeper into the shadows.
Overhead: three mallards, a raven, and a host of crows. A pileated on an
aspen trunk, calling. Hairy and downy woodpeckers. Northern flicker.
Sapsucker drumming. Red-bellied woodpecker calling. Just passing through:
black-billed cuckoo, killdeer, alder flycatcher, and field sparrow—voice
like a bouncing pingpong ball: slow, faster, fastest (first I've heard in
the Upper Valley in fifty plus years). Eastern wood pewee, eastern phoebe,
great crested flycatcher, hermit thrush (I can listen to him all day),
Swainson's thrush, robins (many). Red-eyed and blue-headed vireos. Brown
creeper. House wren, ballisticly singing. Warblers: American redstart,
northern yellow, common yellowthroat, blackpoll (passing through),
chestnut-sided, pine, and black-throated blue (nine species total).
Sparrows: song, white-throated, chipping, and dark-eyed junco. Northern
cardinal. House finch. Yellow clouds of goldfinches. Indigo bunting on an
electric line, singing. Scarlet tanager. Brown-headed cowbird. The roll
call of a morning in full voice.
Fifty species, a splendid harvest on a splendid morning, the ledger of dawn
written in feathers and song. Flowers and chorusing treefrogs.
