Seeking the new

Brown Thrasher  at Windswept Bog

 I love a new experience. It may be why I love birding.  There is elation at hearing or seeing a bird that I’ve never seen before, or that I rarely see.  It makes the day somehow special and memorable.

I know that soras and rails are at Milestone Bog, but I have never seen one there, despite the hundred times I’ve hiked there.  Until I did..,yesterday!  “You never step in the same river twice,” but hearing  the sora  made it  really true.

Birding also is comforting when birds are where we’ve seen them before…like the killdeer near the sand exchange pool at the bog…or the pine warbler in every pine stand this weekend.

But there is special love for the new…like the brown thrasher in the path at Windswept Bog this morning…the light wasn’t good enough to get a great picture,  but I didn’t even get a picture of the sora!  ( will I be “trimbled” for that, given that it’s a rara avis?)

Birders even go in for “FOY”, first of year  birds , in their hug of their favorite birds and landscapes.  I guess it’s all firsts here  today…

Seeking Spring on Daffodil Weekend

In the mud

In the greening moss

In the fern fiddles pushing up from water

In the unleaved  gnarls of the beech’s arms

And the newly red-budded maples

In the grasping greenbrier

And the blue skies beyond the chickadee ”I-I-I love you” song 

In the warmed places on the trail and in the shaded

In the quiet and the “birdy” spaces

To open the future

And grow up from the past

Prick up your ears  to the sounds of rebirth

Sharpen your vision to the signs of the earth

And the persons trying  to move us all forward

Like the wood anemones and fern fronds

With pent up energy released by the sun

And the stored up desire that justice be won

Like the daffodils prolific against the dead stalks

The shoots undaunted by last night’s frost

Celebrate Easter and Passover and all the spring feasts

Leave behind the old grudges and worries at least

Enjoin this reopening, this greening , this birth

Of the new season and peace for all earth

Wood Anemone

Ferns emerging

 

Maple's red buds