Another American Adventure: birds, wood and thorns

Tuesday, March 22, 2011

birds, wood and thorns

Jubilee and I took a walk at Knob Hill this morning. Many trees are down, blocking the trails. I didn't notice any buds on the trees, but there are a lot of thorny branches about with little buds on them. And birds singing.
It is not really cold here anymore either. Perfect outside weather.

1 comment:

BarbaraMarch 22, 2011 at 11:53 AM
We still have some snow cover. It may be gone with the spring rains in a week. You can hear more birds and the chill is mellower. I am anxious to see the green mist in the tree canopy that signals buds are opening.
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"In those first days, people said, a squirrel could run the long length of Pennsylvania without ever touching the ground. In those first days, the woods were white oak and chestnut, hickory, maple, sycamore, walnut, wild ash, wild plum, and white pine. The pine grew on the ridgetops where the mountains' lumpy spines stuck up and their skin was thinnest.

"The wilderness was uncanny, unknown. Benjamin Franklin had already invented his stove in Philadelphia by 1753, and Thomas Jefferson was a schoolboy in Virginia; French soldiers had been living in forts along Lake Erie for two generations. But west of the Alleghenies in western Pennsylvania, there was not even a settlement, not even a cabin. No Indians lived there, or even near there.

"Wild grapevines tangled the treetops and shut out the sun. Few songbirds lived in the deep woods. Bright Carolina parakeets - red, green, and yellow - nested in the dark forest. There were ravens then, too. Woodpeckers rattled the big trees' trunks, ruffed grouse whirred their tail feathers in the fall, and every long once in a while a nervous gang of empty-headed turkeys came hustling and kicking through the leaves - but no one heard any of this, no one at all."

Annie Dillard, An American Childhood.