Date: 6/9/26 5:30 am From: Ted Levin <tedlevin1966...> Subject: [VTBIRD] 09 June 2026: Hurricane Hill (1,100 feet), WRJ
4:44 a.m.—twenty-three minutes before sunrise. Forty-seven degrees; a west
wind at one mile per hour, gusting to two, if my iPhone can be trusted.
Feels calm and looks calm; even the leaves hang motionless. In the west, a
half moon floats in a pale blue, cloudless sky. In the east, the horizon is
striated, delicate orange and yellow gathering ahead of sunrise. To the
north, the sky is lightly bruised, wispy blue-gray. To the south, who
knows—the rising hill stifles my view. Fog hangs in the valleys, tracing
the rivers. A deep, green world matures into summer.
June advances, and I can no longer see through the maples and oaks or into
the crowns of the trees. Unless a bird alights in some small opening, I am
left to listen. Yellow hawkweed and buttercup brighten the roadside.
Strawberry flowers are pollinated. Garlic mustard in seed. Red maple keys
are nearly ready to fall. Milk snakes bask in the meadow, in the barn, and
on the ledgy outcrops in the morning sun. (A neighbor had one in the garage
rafters, a garland of barn swallow feathers protruding from its mouth.)
Fringed polygala is fading. Wild leeks have faded. Rhododendron, peaking.
Azalea, gone by. Gray treefrogs and spring peepers, calling. American toads
and wood frogs, eggs ripen and hatch. Green frogs and bullfrogs have yet to
begin chorusing.
Snowshoe hare—the first I’ve seen in a decade—grazes along the edge of the
woods—round face. Erect ears. Brown above, white below. Four long white
stockings. Moves slowly, measured hops, as though it has all the time in
the world, its big brown eyes fixed on me.
4:44 a.m.: Chickadees, already singing, are joined seven minutes later by
red-eyed vireos and ovenbirds.
5:00 a.m.: Catbird inventive in a gray birch.
*The Blended Chorus (thirty-three species): *Canada goose overhead; downy
woodpecker, pileated woodpecker, yellow-bellied sapsucker; eastern phoebe;
eastern wood-pewee; tufted titmouse (mice, really—there were a lot of
them); white-breasted and red-breasted nuthatches; American crow and common
raven; blue jay with its waterpump song; American robin, surprisingly
subdued; hermit thrush; wood thrush; eastern bluebird; cedar waxwing;
warblers—chestnut-sided, northern yellowthroat, black-throated green,
black-throated blue, American redstart, northern parula, black-and-white;
scarlet tanager—how can so bold a red remain hidden in green leaves?;
eastern towhee; house finch; indigo bunting; American goldfinch; song
sparrow; dark-eyed junco.
Two days ago, near the top of Hurricane Hill, late in the afternoon, on a
path I’ve walked a hundred times since returning from Costa Rica in late
April, a male yellow-bellied sapsucker crossed the road and lit against the
trunk of an aspen with a soft thud. He looked at me and waited while the
female slipped from a neat, round cavity, perhaps an inch and a half
across. Then he hitched himself upward and disappeared inside. From within,
chicks still too small to be seen began to murmur—soft, almost lost beneath
the day, a sound I might have missed if the wind had been any stronger.
I’ve been visiting the sapsuckers ever since ... always at a respectful
distance.
5:12 a.m.: A hairy woodpecker, early to rise, drums on a weathered oak stub
across from the sapsuckers’ nest.
5:13 a.m.: The female sapsucker, roosting in a nearby hemlock, calls. Three
minutes later she flies to the nest tree, calls again—more softly now—and
slips into the cavity.
5:17 a.m.: The male emerges, skimming low over the road, nearly brushing
me, fecal sacs packed in his bill. He lands on a red oak just behind me,
tucks the sacs into a fissure in the bark, wipes his bill on lichen, and
vanishes into the woods, as if the morning simply folds him back into
itself.
The sapsucker's nest cavity—the view unobstructed—is in a quaking aspen,
faces southwest, ten feet from the road, and seven feet up. Dark in the
morning; bathed in afternoon sunlight. Wood on the rim of the nest is
polished and bright, worn smooth by busy, scuffing feet. Several feet
directly above the nest, last year's nest (I assume) faces the same
direction. Absent woodpeckers, the rim dark and weathered, the cavity
remains unused. A woodpecker artifact, available rent-free, a small
abandoned doorway holding the weather and the light.
