Date: 9/13/26 5:44 am From: Ted Levin <tedlevin1966...> Subject: [VTBIRD] 13 September 2026: Hurricane Hill (1,100 feet), WRJ
5:53 a.m., thirty-three minutes before sunrise. Wind south-southeast, six
miles per hour, gusting to sixteen. A migration roadblock. A blend of thin
drizzle and rising river fog ... hard to separate into components. Matters
little to the owl barking in the hemlocks, rolling hoots hijacked by the
wind. Drizzle turns to rain. Fog thickens, rises, softening contours of
nearby hills, eclipsing those farther away. Leaves, noticeably blushing and
rusting, amplify the sound of rain. Sun sneaks into a saturated sky,
unnoticed (by me).
Crows stay put, scattered in the crowns of maples, cawing. Wet, black
flowers on dark stems. Like a rainy morning at summer camp. No one wanted
to get out of bed and go to breakfast.
I pick several sprigs of goldenrod to keep summer breathing a little longer
in a kitchen vase.
Blue jay screams. Cardinal chips: a well-spaced *tick, tick, tick*. No sign
of woodpeckers. Or doves, noisy wings silent for the moment. Phoebe on a
lilac limb, mum as marmalade, rainwater dripping from its tail, conducting
the weather.
Forty-eight hours without a hummingbird. Twenty-four hours without a
broad-winged hawk, last heard (not seen), yesterday above the art fair in
Woodstock. A sharp, thin cry on a bright, sunny afternoon.
*Dead in the Road (DOR): *A hatchling milk snake, still as stone, no longer
or wider than a number 2 pencil. Banded beige and purple-gray, with a
keratinized egg tooth protruding from the tip of its upper jaw. Like
Houdini, the snakelet had slipped from a seemingly inescapable chamber,
sawing and sawing and sawing at the inside of its oblong, leathery egg.
Where there is one hatchling, there must be others. Milk snakes are my
frontline defense against tick-borne disease, along with barred owls.
Adults eat white-footed mice, the principal vector of *Borrelia burgdorferi*,
the spirochete spread by the black-legged tick that causes Lyme disease.
White-footed mice do not get sick. Almost everything else does. A mast year
means mice upon mice the following summer. An adult milk snake eats,
roughly, a mouse a week, maybe more: twenty or more mice from May through
September.
*At the feeders, *goldfinches and juncos eat seed after seed, hulls
scattering across the deck. Chickadees, titmice, and nuthatches come and
go; each takes a single seed to tuck into the fork of a sodden branch or
behind a piece of loose bark. Remarkably, they remember where they have
hidden them—thousands of seeds, some waiting uneaten until the eve of
spring ... six months from now.
