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 Like a flashback or a waking dream, dawn again brings rain. A white-gray sky, a raindrop-peppered pond, a diving pair of ring-necked ducks in love. The green of the pondside vegetation seems slightly more intense, is all; and the air temperature seems slightly more chill -- about 38 degrees, in fact, first thing.
But the resident birds seem busy enough -- although grackle activity has actually lessened somewhat. Not the cowbirds': their piercing squee resounds in the damp, developing foliage. There's a song sparrow nest on the easternmost island, I'm sure of it. And a goldfinch pays a visit to the cool backyard. It rains as steadily in Glen Cove through the morning (though slightly more gently than yesterday). Out the east window there, I see a line of nine double-crested cormorants in flight, straggling across the pale sky, northbound. Crows and gulls cross Route 1 at a height of about thirty or forty feet, and a male grackle perches like a little dark lord in an overhanging hillside tree. From time to time I step to the window to gauge the rain's intensity from the rate of drops that strike mud puddles that reflect the nondescript southern sky. It lets up in early afternoon. In mid-afternoon, above Crockett's Quarry, headed in a northeasterly direction, an osprey flaps nonchalantly over carrying a small fish in its talons. It's the first osprey I've seen this year -- first of many, doubtless. And not long after the fishhawk's passage, the western sky clears as it did yesterday (only a little earlier), and the sun again lets loose like a heatlamp against the eastern scenery. The view I take a photo of includes the shadow of the upper part of the house -- the loft part, where I stand. Night takes a bit longer to fall. It's a cool one, with whimsical breezes. |
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| Bird Report is a discursive daily record of what's outside my high north window in Rockland, Maine, USA (44°07'N latitude, 69°07'W longitude). --Brian Willson | |||||
©1998 by 3IP |