Another Morning in Paradise

5:34 a.m. (twenty-two minutes before sunrise, already forty-nine minutes later than at the summer solstice). Sixty-four degrees (eighteen degrees warmer than yesterday morning). Wind south at seven miles per hour, gusting to seventeen. Aspen leaves expressing themselves. My neighbor’s Buddhist prayer flags, thin and colorful, out straight ... the morning’s weather vanes.

The sky is overcast, gray, and restlessly in motion. A low cloud ceiling scrapes Moose Mountain and shears away the summit of Smarts Mountain. Cube and Moosilaukee have vanished from sight. An absence of river fog today—none of yesterday’s thick uprising from beds below, Ice Age-like, with only the summit of Smarts thrust through, an island in an ocean of moisture. What a difference a day makes. No sign of the sun.

5:46 a.m.: Inside the cave of a rhododendron, a catbird meows. Inside the sky vault, raven calls ... much more ambitiously than the catbird.

5:47 a.m.: Goldfinches, everywhere and noisy (many little beaks to feed).

5:49 a.m.: Four crows caw, heralding a new day. All head north. One pauses in the crown of a roadside maple and weighs my intentions, then chases after the other three, screaming like a cartoon character left behind.

The fuse of autumn has been lit: A leaf, a branch, an entire sapling in transition. Bloodshot eyes of August. Birdsong—and color—drains from the trees and meadows. And from the shadows, crickets and katydids murmur softly, an undercurrent of summer’s withdrawal.

5:52 a.m.: House wren, hidden, cuts loose.

I pause, attempting to tease out a warbler among the dancing aspen leaves. Yellowthroat, maybe. Maybe not.

6:23 a.m.: A half-hearted red-eyed vireo sings ... without conviction. Softer. Phrases are more widely spaced than early in the summer. A farewell cantata.

6:46 a.m.: A gimlet-eyed broadwing on an electric line, staring straight down. When perched, a hawk the size and shape of a football. When on the wing, high above the corrugated landscape, a feathered kite, circling and rising and rising and rising, sometimes out of sight.

7:12 a.m.: A male dark-eyed junco lands on the pergola, a small green grasshopper clamped in his bill. He scolds me through a mouthful ... tick, tick, tick. The chicks are out of the nest but still in the hanging begonia, somewhere among the pink stalks and blossoms. Carefully, I water the begonia. Not carefully enough. Both chicks, fully feathered, burst out and hop-flutter through the front yard. I gather them up and return them to the begonia; the male ticks and scolds without let-up. Chicks won’t stay put. Again and again, I chase them down, like feathered bubbles. I reach, and they’re always just beyond my grasp. After the third capture and return, they finally stay put. Their father feeds them. Everyone’s satisfied ... and hungry, including me.

The News of the Day, twenty-one species: ruby-throated hummingbird, many at the feeders; black-capped chickadee; tufted titmouse; brown creeper; blue jay, squawking; Carolina wren; cedar waxwing, keeping track of ripening berries (black, blue, and highbush cranberry); song sparrow; chipping sparrow; purple finch; northern cardinal; and always a favorite, rose-breasted grosbeak.

Deep Summer Blues: Yesterday, mid-morning, as I delivered Sungold tomatoes to a neighbor, three broad-winged hawks wheeled on invisible columns of heated air, which rose off the surface of Hurricane Hill. Unhurried and high, not the arrow-straight flight of the eagles that pass over the Hill en route between the Ottauquechee and the Connecticut. Broadwings (like barred owls) hunt from a perch, often over a road or a trail. Seldom from the wing. Never at a couple of thousand feet. Birds on the move, the vanguard of the continental turning.

From My Endemic Coast: Shorebirds have already begun to gather on the beaches of Long Island, mostly ruddy turnstones and sanderlings and a few semi-palmated plovers and semi-palmated sandpipers (semi-palms, as they say at the beach). Juvenile common terns and black skimmers assembled along the shore, waiting to be fed. Piping plovers scurried across the hot, white sand, while chicks pursued their parents, pleading.

Monarchs, green darner dragonflies, and barn and rough-winged swallows have begun to drift south. Swallows and dragonflies fed on the wing (hopefully saltmarsh mosquitoes and green-head flies) ... coastal takeout. Monarchs were caught again and again in pop-up shade canopies.

Summer, ineluctably now, leans toward autumn. And I’m left in the seasonal limbo, on the heel of summer, on the toe of autumn.

I’m not alone in it.

My granddaughter, Izzy, is only three days into kindergarten—new clothes, new supplies, a new small world opening before her. She commutes to school enthusiastically on her bicycle (supervised). Shorebirds stream down the world’s coastlines. In the garden, the tomatoes come on faster than I can keep up.

On the west face of Hurricane Hill, gray fox kits nearly as large as their mother still plead for liquid lunch, a taste of spring. Apparently, there’s no calendar in their den.

VIDEO COURTESY OF DAVID PELLETIER (turn up the volume for full suckling sounds).

To my subscribers, thank you for joining me on this journey. I appreciate the company. If you’re a paid subscriber to Another Morning in Paradise, thank you. If you’re not, please consider; your financial support helps me create these postings.

As a lifelong naturalist and Yankee fan, I follow a trail blazed by John Burroughs and John Muir, neither of whom paid much attention to baseball. My work has appeared in Houghton Mifflin’s The Best American Sports Writing, Audubon, Sierra, Sports Illustrated, National Wildlife, OnEarth, National Geographic Traveler, National Geographic Books, Yankee, The New York Times, Newsday, The Boston Globe, The Chicago Sun-Times, The Guardian, and The Daily Telegraph, among other publications and anthologies. For twenty-four years, I was a regular commentator on Vermont Public Radio, and occasionally on NPR. I am the author of Backtracking: The Way of a Naturalist (1987), Blood Brook: A Naturalist’s Home Ground (1992), and Liquid Land: A Journey Through the Florida Everglades (2003), among other works of nonfiction. I received the Burroughs Medal in 2004, the highest literary honor awarded to an American nature writer. E. O. Wilson called America’s Snake: The Rise and Fall of the Timber Rattlesnake (2016) a beautifully written book [that] demonstrates just how good nature literature can be.

Beginning on 14 March 2020, the day after I returned home from Costa Rica, at the onset of the pandemic lockdown, I started writing a daily journal—part natural history, part memoir, and part commentary—that appeared here on Substack. Since the 25 August 2021 post, I have edited the 526 entries (deleting, combining, modifying) into a new book, The Promise of Sunrise: Finding Solace in a Broken World, which Green Writers Press published on the vernal equinox of 2025.

From: Seven Days

Ted Levin, Green Writers Press, 400 pages. $21.95.

A pissed-off woodpecker flies in and screams...

When COVID-19 crashed into his life in 2020, naturalist Ted Levin began taking a walk each day at sunrise through the woods and wetlands around his home in Thetford. His walks begat a daily blog and now a lyrical book that brings to life the world of efts and otters, warblers and wrens, chickadees and coyotes. Engaging natural history lessons — loon semen and mammoth bones make an appearance — weave through the daily entries, and slowly the reader also learns the story of the author’s life.

Levin’s writing can be extraordinarily vivid: Coyotes “hurl their voices at the crescent moon”; a bobcat has a face “like a soiled, fraying softball”; chickadees are “four maestros working on a score.” Writing such as this demands to be read as one reads poetry, in small sips, to be fully savored.

—Candace Page.