Field journal
Notes from the backyard, the slow hours at home, and the long roads that lead somewhere worth staying.
The yard tells me different things now than it did a decade ago, and I have been trying to put my finger on the difference. The birds are mostly the same. The trees are mostly the same. The structure of the year is mostly the same. What has changed is what I am able to hear.
The middle of May is, in the part of the country I live in, the rough midpoint of the year by feel if not by calendar. Spring is fully in. The leaves have come out. The migrants are mostly through. The summer birds are settling onto their territories. There is a stretch of about two weeks in May when the yard contains more bird life than at any other time of the calendar, and the noise of it at first light is louder than it will be again until the same week next year.
I have been drinking the first coffee of the morning on the back step, not in the kitchen and not in the chair by the window, but on the step itself, which is concrete and slightly cold and faces east. The change is small. It has made a much larger difference than I expected.
The wrens picked the hose reel. This is not a thing I would have predicted, in part because the hose reel is one of the few human-made objects in the yard I use regularly, and in part because there are at least three nest boxes available within fifty feet that I had set up specifically for wrens.
The porch came back this week. I do not mean the structure, which has been there all winter, but the use of it. The first morning warm enough to take coffee outside happened on Saturday, and I have been on the porch for at least an hour every morning since.
The Driftless backroads in April are some of the best driving in the country and almost no one knows them. The hills are still bare enough to read the geology, the streams are full from snowmelt, and the small towns along the bottom roads have not yet hit their tourist season, which in most of these places is short and runs from late May to early October. I took a long loop through three counties last weekend, two days and a night, and I want to put down some notes while it is fresh.