Date: 8/21/25 5:28 am From: Ted Levin <tedlevin1966...> Subject: [VTBIRD] 21 August 2025: Hurricane Hill, WRJ
5:47 a.m. (fourteen minutes before sunrise). Forty-six degrees, wind North two miles per hour, gusting to four. A world encased in river fog, thin and spreading up and over Hurricane Hill. Much to hear. Little to see, visibility a hundred yards. The sun sneaks up, lightens fog from the inside out, (literally) a dampened glow. Doesn't stop goldfinches and crows, the latter above the trees, the former above the meadow.
Crows constantly call (the only way to keep track of each other). Seven pass overhead, spread out, a downpour of discordant screeches and barks. Otherwise, for the moment, everything else is silent ... even the crickets.
AOR: three red efts in transition. I ferry all three across the road. A quick flip. All land rightside-up. Gone in no particular hurry. A junco prospecting for seeds. DOR: three red efts in transition, amphibious pancakes just short of their destinations.
Gray squirrels in the maples, leaping and racing, branch to branch. I plot their path by a wake of conversing leaves, never actually seeing the squirrels.
*Annals of Auditory Amusement*: raven to the south; green heron (somewhere overhead); blue jays in the woods barking and honking (much gossip now that summer drains away); northern cardinal; black-capper chickadee; tufted titmouse; red-bellied woodpecker (loud); downy woodpecker (soft); two pileated, one parent and one juvenile (educated guess) chasing and screaming, back and forth across the road, the bond of dependancy fracturing with the season; hermit thrush and red-eyed vireo calling; cedar waxwing whispering. Gray catbird meowing (no jazz riffs this morning); song sparrow. Two warblers, common yellowthroat and American redstart. Red-breasted nuthatch. House finch. Twenty-two species in all.
8:16 a.m. First hummingbird (female) visits the feeder and the red, tubular flowers that entwine the pergola, hours later than last week ... the irons of torpor slowly crumble.
8:25 a.m. Fog dispersing. A slow, methodical morning. A day not quite awake.
