June 5: Dodging swallowtails

Route 52 was a corridor of butterflies today--all along Megunticook Lake, swallowtails rose up before my car, then fluttered away in my wake. My car felt like a large, unwieldy instrument of destruction around such fragile bits of life.

Between lake, mountain
I try to dodge butterflies
in my monstrous car.

June 4: Borrowed shirt

His old linen shirt,
shrunk in the wash and now mine--
my possessiveness sparked.

June 3: Tattoo

In the taco joint
woman with much-tattooed chest
holding her baby.

I'm wondering how she nurses the baby without frightening him.

June 2: Return of the Red-eyed Vireo

In the neighborhood this morning...

Another hot morning.
Back for the summer,
Vireo sings non-stop.

June 1: Nest

Helped lead a walk today as part of the Acadia Birding Festival on Mount Desert Island, on the Wonderland Trail in Acadia National Park. The short trail passes through stunted boreal spruce and jack pine forest to emerge on the granite shores of the sea. As we scanned the waves, one participant looked down instead... and found the nest of a Song Sparrow tucked in a rose bush, neatly cupping four mottled blue eggs.

Vastness that is sea
alongside these small blue eggs,
singing sparrow.

May 31: June bugs

June bugs bounce off screens
in the velvet dark,
my only company.

May 30: Run

First run in a few months, could only manage about a mile. But I had to start somehow. Today was spring's first very warm day--in the 80s--and the only bird heard was a cardinal blurting out his staccato song at day's end.

As I jog slowly
down the busy roadside,
I step on deer tracks.

May 29: Rain again

After a brief respite from rain and drizzle, wet weather returns. I didn't have the heart to stop the jay from stealing peanuts from the bird feeder this afternoon, it looked so wet and miserable. A bit like my state of mind. The grey squirrel, however, still had to go.

Bedraggled blue jay,

I won't shoo you from my feeder

this time.

May 28: Spruce forest

Walking on my favorite trail through Cathedral Woods, the path soft, well-padded with spruce needles and thick, bright moss, rotting stumps of fallen spruces and cones rolling underfoot. From beyond the dense wall of spruces, long ethereal song of the Winter Wren. This is a magic place. No wonder the children build fairy houses here.

Kinglet's high-pitched song
spills down like rolling cones
from the spruce tops.

May 27: Dead bird

Some migrating birds get this far in their journey and still don't make it. Today a dead kingbird was found on a beach. We could tell by its prominent breastbone, sharp through its soft feathers, that the bird had completely depleted its fat stores. It had flown thousands of miles from South America this spring, only to starve in the fog on a small Maine island.

The kingbird wasn't the only dead bird found. But the other casualties, a Canada Warbler and two yellowthroats found in the middle of a trail, were victims of cats--a fate somehow even more tragic than simple depletion and exhaustion.

Dead kingbird in hand--
sad discovery of sharp bones,
hidden red crown.

May 26: Birds on the beach

Monhegan. Days of rain and fog have grounded migrating songbirds, forcing them to forage in the wrack on the beach for food to get them through until they can continue their flight northward. Colorful redstarts flitted like butterflies on the sand, hopped around at our feet.

Suspecting this kind of situation, our friend Derek had brought mealworms to share. The birds were so hungry that they overcame their usual shyness and ate them right out of our hands. Even flycatchers were chasing mealworms tossed in the air.

I can barely feel it,
this small bird
feeding in my hand.

Wet and bedraggled American Redstart resting

Redstart with a mealworm

Derek feeds a redstart mealworms from his hand