Cool and clear, with sound out of the east: the beeping of quarry trucks and a loud scraping of metal on rock as the sun makes its way through the canopy, prompting a burst of song from a common yellowthroat.
Cool and clearing after yesterday’s storms. A red-bellied woodpecker calls from a dead limb at the top of the tallest black locust, making it sway. Below him on another dead branch, a fledgling is being fed by its mother.
Breezy and cool, with the smell of smoke a bit diminished. The patter of rain. Three yellow walnut leaves flutter to the ground together. A rumble of thunder.
Unseasonably cool with the pall of wildfire smoke over the region. It is as thick as a thin mist and burns my throat. But even though their sun is a lurid red, the goldfinches and a common yellowthroat keep singing.
The sky is white, though the weather app insists it’s clear: thick haze from wildfires far to the north, I think. Goldfinches dominate the morning soundtrack, beginning to nest just as many of the migrants are wrapping it up.
Heat mediated by a breeze. A hummingbird clearwing moth visits the garden, sipping nectar from bergamot tubes with a straw-like tongue swifter than thought. I read up on the species: its migratory habits, its lack of any hearing, its taste for purple.
Sun in the treetops as the tanager revisits his hit song, no longer in heavy rotation. A firefly sails past with his light off.
Clear and cool—the first morning of a dry high. A hummingbird visits the orange jewelweed below the porch. A pungent, camphor-like odor makes me think of blossoming yarrow, but I finally decide instead it’s coming from the black locust limbs smashed down in a storm more than a week ago.
Breezy and cool, with enough high-altitude murk to keep the sun at half strength. A firefly circles the arm of my chair. Two more bindweed blossoms have opened above yesterday’s, which hangs limp as an empty balloon.
A white bindweed flower has opened in the yard—morning glory enough for a sky more white than blue. Wild garlic heads have almost all straightened up and begun to split open.
After a downpour at dawn, the sky brightens, then darkens again. The aspen and tulip tree saplings in my yard take turns trembling in the breeze. The tanager sings.
A sun shower an hour after sunrise. Hummingbirds battle over the mop-headed bergamot. I scuttle back indoors to get things done before a scheduled power outage.
Overcast and cool. A hen turkey foraging at the woods’ edge suddenly vaults into the air with a great flapping and clucking and lands on a low walnut limb, a red fox like an apparition melting back into the shadows.
Rain subsiding into mizzle by mid-morning. The distant thunder of a pileated woodpecker. A scarlet tanager sings quietly from the small trees below my mother’s sitting room.