Date: 10/20/25 5:47 am From: Ted Levin <tedlevin1966...> Subject: [VTBIRD] 20 October 2025: Hurricane Hill (1,100 feet), WRJ
6:49 a.m. (twenty-two minutes before sunrise; twenty-four hours before the
new moon). Fifty-seven (balmy) degrees, wind Southeast eleven miles per
hour, gusting to thirty-two. Sky, gray and muddied. Drizzling. Branches
spare. The few leaves left (mostly red oak) are all in communication. A few
let loose and sail northwest, following the path of clouds. Rolling hills
above the north bank of the White River (Dothan and Jericho),
smoothed, featureless, two-dimensional geography ... laminated by moisture.
Drizzle morphs to sprinkle to rain to momentary downpour. Sky brightens in
increments. Everything drifting northwest: the clouds, the leaves ripped
from their perch, the six crows spread below the low, gray ceiling, chatty
and spread out, hurrying to be elsewhere.
Yesterday's interant ensemble—ruby- and golden-crowned kinglets, pine
siskin, purple finch, myrtle warbler (yellow-rumped)—hushed or gone in
advance of the weather.
At home, on the feeders, all chickadees, juncos, nuthatches (both), and
titmice. A pileated finds something to laugh about.
*What a Difference a Day Makes Department: *Lake Runnemede, a sixty-two
acre reservoir, a former oxbow of the Connecticut River, was dammed by the
town of Windsor in 1883. A bench on the east side faces Mount Ascutney, the
lowering sun, and across the curled lake. I could have sat there all
afternoon looking at Ascutney, the sun on my face. Like an old man on a
boardwalk by the beach.
But I didn't. I looped the lake searching for a pair of cackling geese. Two
had been reported the day before. I found hundreds of Canada geese tipping
up and feeding or bathing or resting in the sun (not unlike those old men
on the boardwalk), bills tucked under a wing, drifting in the breeze. I
failed with the cackling geese, but score high on sunshine, which seems a
distant memory this morning.
