A small buck stalks past, his six-point rack held high, minutes before the sun tops the ridge. I can see some cold-weather gnats at the woods’ edge pogoing in the sunbeam. A bluebird up by the barn calls and calls.
Cloudy in the east at sunrise, as the moon’s sideways smile fades overhead. The plaintive piping of white-throated sparrows is interrupted by a song sparrow’s cheery warble.
Sun rising through an increasingly threadbare forest canopy of mellow reds and yellows, all converging on brown: oaks in November. A hunter walks out of the woods in camouflage gray.
Time-change day. It’s cold and very still. A lone goose flies past the half moon, honking.
Contrails thicken into clouds between dwindling patches of pastel blue, but there’s still enough sun to set the crown of the big scarlet oak aglow. A few distant cries of geese off to the north are submerged in Carolina wren song.
Windy and warm for late October. Cumulous clouds accumulate. Tulip-tree samaras comes spinning into the yard like a drone swarm, but one that seeds life rather than death. The kak-kak-kak of a Cooper’s hawk.
Clouds sinking into the trees at daybreak. A thin, high jumble of notes from a brown creeper. It feels and even sounds like rain, but that’s just the dry tick of leaves falling into leaves.
Sun glowing through thin clouds—not just whiter, brighter, as a bygone ad for laundry soap once put it. The nasal call of a nuthatch. A slight breath of wind and a black birch at the woods’ edge divests itself of another hundred leaves.
Neither as cold nor as clear as recent mornings, with the sun thinly veiled by atmospheric murk. The golden-leaved tulip tree in the yard looks duller now than it did in the full moonlight at 4:00 a.m.
With most of the forest understorey bare, one can see so much more through the trees: a full moon setting in the west, a flock of geese, the white tail of a deer retreating like a ghost into the dark mountain laurel bushes.
Clear and cold. A few minutes before sunrise, with crows already noising about, a pair of screech owls start duetting up on the ridge, fierce high tremolos descending into tender trills.
Just enough light to see the pointer on my dial thermometer: 37°F. The first white-throated sparrows begin whistling from the edges of the meadow, thin high notes. Sky begins to appear between the ridgetop trees.
Clear and still. Noise from the valley dies down as the sun climbs the sky and destroys the inversion layer. I notice every crack between the boards on the porch floor is jammed with tulip tree samaras.
“October’s bright blue weather” continues. As it warms up, I take great, greedy breaths of the autumn air, laden with geosmin and other earthy compounds associated with fermentation and decay. A mid-morning blast from the limestone quarry two miles away shakes the house.