7:35 a.m. 19 degrees, wind N 9 mph. Sky: thickly mottled, sunlight
spills through cracks in the clouds and washes down west-sloping hills, an
ambiguous morning. Permanent streams: ice outgrowths from the shoreline,
transparent curtains reach down the rocks into the tumbling water . . .
yesterday's caves, today's crawlspaces. Wetlands: bright but flatly lit,
lingering snow transitioning from fresh to tired white. Hairy woodpecker
working a pine, invisible but audible, hidden by a phalanx of lanky trees.
Pond: where the stream joins its delta, an icy oval, gray and bumpy.
Otherwise, hermetically sealed. High overhead, a crow flies north, alone in
an equivocal morning.

A purposeful riot: a horde of jays mobs the feeders, flashes of white and
cerulean. Ironclad and cranky. A discordant chorus, the neighborhood mix of
birdsong recapped and translated. Jays displace titmice and chickadees,
disrupt woodpeckers. Sunflower seeds rain on the lawn . . . to the eventual
benefit of Ernie, the Hungarian partridge, two hen turkeys, three doves,
and three gray squirrels. Everyone else waits around under the fractured
sunlight.