Date: 8/17/26 6:45 am From: Ted Levin <tedlevin1966...> Subject: [VTBIRD] 17 August 2026: Hurricane Hill (1,100 feet), WRJ
5:34 a.m. (twenty-two minutes before sunrise, already forty-nine minutes
later than at the summer solstice). Sixty-four degrees (eighteen degrees
warmer than yesterday morning). Wind south at seven miles per hour, gusting
to seventeen. Aspen leaves expressing themselves. My neighbor's
Buddhist prayer flags, thin and colorful, out straight ... the morning's
weather vanes.
The sky is overcast, gray, and restlessly in motion. A low cloud ceiling
scrapes Moose Mountain and shears away the summit of Smarts Mountain. Cube
and Moosilaukee have vanished from sight. An absence of river fog
today—none of yesterday's thick uprising from beds below, Ice Age-like,
with only the summit of Smarts thrust through, an island in an ocean of
moisture. What a difference a day makes. No sign of the sun.
5:46 a.m.: Inside the cave of a rhododendron, a catbird in the mews. Inside
the sky vault, raven calls ... much more ambitiously than the catbird.
5:47 a.m.: Goldfinches, everywhere and noisy (many little beaks to feed).
5:49 a.m.: Four crows caw, heralding a new day. All head north. One pauses
in the crown of a roadside maple and weighs my intentions, then chases
after the other three, screaming like a cartoon character left behind.
The fuse of autumn has been lit: A leaf, a branch, an entire sapling in
transition. Bloodshot eyes of August. Birdsong—and color—drains from the
trees and meadows. And from the shadows, crickets and katydids murmur
softly, an undercurrent of summer's withdrawal.
5:52 a.m.: House wren, hidden, cuts loose.
I pause, attempting to tease out a warbler among the dancing aspen leaves.
Yellowthroat, maybe. Maybe not.
6:23 a.m.: A half-hearted red-eyed vireo sings ... without conviction.
Softer. Phrases are more widely spaced than early in the summer. A farewell
cantata.
6:46 a.m.: A gimlet-eyed broadwing on an electric line, staring straight
down. When perched, a hawk the size and shape of a football. When on the
wing, high above the corrugated landscape, a feathered kite, circling and
rising and rising and rising, sometimes out of sight.
7:12 a.m.: A male dark-eyed junco lands on the pergola, a small green
grasshopper clamped in his bill. He scolds me through a mouthful ... t*ick,
tick, tick. *The* c*hicks are out of the nest but still in the hanging
begonia, somewhere among the pink stalks and blossoms. Carefully, I water
the begonia. Not carefully enough. Both chicks, fully feathered, burst out
and hop-flutter through the front yard. I gather them up and return them to
the begonia; the male ticks and scolds without let-up. Chicks won't stay
put. Again and again, I chase them down, like feathered bubbles. I reach,
and they're always just beyond my grasp. After the third capture and
return, they finally stay put. Their father feeds them. Everyone's
satisfied ... and hungry, including me.
*While Morning Fails to Brighten, twenty-one species: *ruby-throated
hummingbird, many at the feeders; black-capped chickadee; tufted titmouse;
brown creeper; blue jay, squawking; Carolina wren; cedar waxwing, keeping
track of ripening berries (black, blue, and highbush cranberry); song
sparrow; chipping sparrow; purple finch; northern cardinal; and always a
favorite, rose-breasted grosbeak.
*Deep Summer Blues: *Yesterday, mid-morning, as I delivered Sungold
tomatoes to a neighbor, three broad-winged hawks wheeled on invisible
columns of heated air, which rose off the surface of Hurricane Hill.
Unhurried and high, not the arrow-straight flight of the eagles that pass
over the Hill en route between the Ottauquechee and the Connecticut.
Broadwings (like barred owls) hunt from a perch, often over a road or a
trail. Seldom from the wing. Never at a couple of thousand feet. Birds on
the move, the vanguard of the continental turning.
*From My Endemic Coast: *Shorebirds have already begun to gather on the
beaches of Long Island, mostly ruddy turnstones and sanderlings and a few
semi-palmated plovers and semi-palmated sandpipers (semi-palms, as they say
at the beach). Juvenile common terns and black skimmers assembled along the
shore, waiting to be fed. Piping plovers scurried across the hot, white
sand, while chicks pursued their parents, pleading.
Monarchs, green darner dragonflies, and barn and rough-winged swallows have
begun to drift south. Swallows and dragonflies fed on the wing (hopefully
saltmarsh mosquitoes and green-head flies) ... coastal takeout. Monarchs
were caught again and again in pop-up shade canopies.
