Date: 7/14/26 5:10 am From: Ted Levin <tedlevin1966...> Subject: [VTBIRD] 14 July 2026: Hurricane Hill (1,100 feet), WRJ
4:47 a.m.—a full thirty-four minutes before the sun breaks the horizon.
Woke to robins heralding the dawn, an hour before sunlight, their songs
stitching the velvet dusk, wide, luminous eyes gathering light. Through the
cranked-open windows, the bedroom fan off, robin song is
inescapable—especially the one serenading on the pergola outside my
bedroom. In the woods, a hermit thrush duets with himself, one bird, two
simultaneous threads of music, soft, rich, refreshing by comparison to
compulsively vocal robins.
The density of daybreak: a sky on fire. Orange. Purple. Pink. Color
stretches northwest above Jericho Hill and beyond. Brushstrokes. Pastel
purple clouds edged in pink. Swirls and windrows. Since I cannot paint, I
stand still, metabolizing sunrise ... my day invigorated. (Though a nap is
never far off.)
5:03 a.m., uphill, beyond my driveway, red-eyed vireos relieve robins,
making up in numbers and duration what they lack in volume. Woodland
elevator music. Southeast Alaska has been spared red-eyed vireos ... a
fortunate occurrence. With the nearly unending daylight, vireos would have
had the opportunity to sing twenty hours a day.
Red-flowering raspberry blooms along the roadsides, shades of sunrise.
Fruit bland as straw. Robins like it. Perhaps that's why they sing robustly.
A doe runs across the meadow. Dissolves into hemlock shade. Whitetails are
the oldest deer species in the New World. Black-tailed deer, the species
that pogo (biologists call the gait *stotting)* through the temperate
rainforests of southeast Alaska, evolved from ancestral whitetails two
million years ago. Mule deer, an open-country race of blacktails that
populate the arid West, are a backcross of black- and white-tailed deer and
are of hybrid origin, perhaps dating to as recently as 7,000 years ago,
thousands of years after the domestication of dogs. A byproduct of the end
of the Ice Age. Even red brocket deer of Mesoamerica evolved from ancestral
white-tailed deer. The generous spread of DNA, and, in the case of mule
deer, another example of the importance of hybridization in the evolution
of animals, once thought of as the realm of plants.
A flock of more than thirty common grackles, a dark cloud—a shaft of autumn
through the heart of summer—noisy and nosy. All over my deck and lawn,
lining the railing and the backs of the porch furniture. Cleaning up
spilled sunflower seeds. Long-tailed, iridescent, garrulous shopvacs. Most
of what they eat is a gift from the three-year-old black bear that walked
across my deck and took down my feeder yesterday, spilling seeds
everywhere. When I appeared on the deck, the bear sauntered off like a
familiar dog, slow and methodical, downhill toward my neighbor's berry
patch.
Among the birds: mourning dove, cooing in on naked, uppermost branch of a
roadside maple; tree swallow; blue-headed vireo; house wren; black-capped
chickadee; tufted titmouse; white-breasted nuthatch; red-breasted nuthatch
(chicks fluttering the feeder almost fly into my face); American crow
(three pester a broad-winged hawk); common raven; bluejay; wood thrush;
grey catbird; bluebird; common yellowthroat; ovenbird; black-throated green
warbler; pine warbler; indigo bunting; cedar waxwing; song sparrow;
chipping sparrow, recently fledged (still fluffy), hopping on the road,
paying me no mind; dark-eyed junco (fledged all four chicks from the plant
hanging from my pergola); red-wing blackbird; eastern towhee. Clouds of
American goldfinches, a meadow on the wing.
Thirty-two bird species, one mammal (and the aftermath of yesterday), and
the first monarch butterfly of the season.
