Another Morning in Paradise

5:27 a.m., eighteen minutes before sunrise. Seventy-two degrees, humid and sticky, the wind out of the northwest at two miles per hour, gusting—loosely speaking—to three. From the close, airless shadows, a hermit thrush sings, sweet and faint.

The morning news: three bats, first of the summer, drafted by the season, head south, dining and migrating at once. Above the meadow, beyond the deck, they coil, curve, circle, spiral. Slow, with an erratic grace. Upright, toes pointed down as though pirouetting across a stage. They seine insects from the fertile sky. I am their audience of one, with the sheltered thrush for accompaniment.

Hummingbirds are up early ... feeding and chasing. Feeder to feeder. Vine honeysuckles to pink begonia. If they don’t stop, I may never make my way uphill.

Dawn on the road. Night lingering in the woods.

Kaleidoscopic heavens: an elastic sky. At first, overcast and bright. Spots and streaks of rose in the northeast, mostly above Smarts Mountain. Pale peach to the north. Then the clouds gather and condense. Blue openings. White fluff, as white as the tip of a fox’s tail, fringed and frosted by the sun. A single beam of sunshine—a searchlight. The thrush in the limelight, still singing; the bats elsewhere.

Mist rises and drifts above the White River and the Connecticut River. Thin and frayed. As the sky opens, the moon appears, a pot-bellied crescent, XXL.

5:26 a.m.: A robin in the woods crooning.

5:47 a.m.: A Carolina wren, hidden in the lilacs, screams—intensely loud for such a small bird. Not to be outdone, across the road a house wren cuts loose: a staccato burst, a machine-gun song. Nonstop wrens, two species, two songs. Sunrise discord.

Five minutes later, a catbird whines. Then an outlying pewee salutes the combustible sky, its sad song marking summer’s movement

Along the Way Home: red-eyed vireo (subdued for a redeye); black-capped chickadee; tufted titmouse; both nuthatches, red- and white-breasted; common raven, headed north, disgorging song; a gang of American crows in the crown of aspens, conversing loudly (I’m drawn over to their discussion ... not an owl or a hawk to be found); blue jay eating blueberries; common yellowthroat, the only warbler singing; song sparrow; chipping sparrow; eastern towhee; eastern phoebe; cedar waxwings, seven, in the naked crown of a slowly dying maple, noting the neighborhood—across the road, rock-hard highbush cranberries ripen; American goldfinch; dark-eyed junco (still incubating in potted begonia).

Twenty-two species in all, a seasonal serenade already beginning to wane.

Bear Schedule: Tuesday and Wednesday evenings, while I watched the Yankees play the Cardinals, a black bear as big as a Buick rose onto my deck, threading with surprising care around the outdoor furniture. It stood on its hind legs and reached over the railing for the sunflower feeder. The bear, it seems, prefers the middle innings, when the starting pitchers begin to fade.

You can’t help but hear an adult black bear on the back deck, ten feet off the ground—the footfalls heavy as dropped stones, a one-mammal marching band. I slid open the screen door. Bears do not scatter from the deck when I appear like the morning squirrels. It dropped from the railing to all fours, looked at me with a kind of puzzled gravity, then walked slowly off the deck.

“You don’t belong up here,” I said.

Bear paused on the lawn. It huffed several times, a low, earthen sound, more rumble than roar. I gathered the feeders in for the night, then huffed back in ragged imitation. The bear considered me for a moment, then drifted off into the forest, moving flat-footed and with weight … not exactly Bojangles.

And me? I returned downstairs to another disappointing Yankee game.

Behind the Scenes on Hurricane Hill: When John D. Rockefeller was asked, “How much is enough?” he answered, “Just a little bit more.”

I’m not sure whether the vixen gray fox ever posed that question to her kits, but to my surprise, David Pelletier’s game cam caught the three of them nursing. Nursing in August! Then came the rest: scratching, nibbling each other’s ears, grooming, pouncing, wrestling, and pestering—mostly their mother.

What was formerly the purview of behavioral ecologists has become, too, the province of backyard enthusiasts. Without a game camera, how else would we know who shares the hillside with us? Of course, there are signs to read: scats, scrapes, gnaws, trails, matted beds, off-key yowls. But the game cam opens another world.

If we homogenized and incorporated the senses of the millions of species now alive on Earth and all those that have become extinct, which is ninety-nine percent of creatures that have ever lived—we might begin to understand how the world presents itself.

Take the gray fox: it reads the world with its nose and leaves messages with its hindquarters—oily fox scribble. Scent may be our forgotten language, but it is the gray fox’s lingua franca. Foxes read one another’s dispatches with a sniff and know who is healthy and who is not. Urine lasts two days; face-rubbing, twenty minutes. A good face rub shortens the life of urine and weakens the message, adding a singular editorial note.

Marking is a highly evolved mammalian language, one that shapes social structure and behavior. Males post notices everywhere, using every means available. Seventy or more drops of urine an hour: silent yellow memos. The discharge of facial glands is rubbed on stumps, rocks, logs, mats of leaves—almost anything. Glands on the foot pads whisper. And the violet gland, at the base of the tail, named for its supposed floral odor, leaves the longest-lasting note—like something pinned to a bulletin board, only muskier.

Without David’s game cam, I could not eavesdrop on the foxes with whom I share this hill. The bear comes and goes, but the foxes keep a den under watch. For three weeks they vanished to some other shelter, some unknown fold of Hurricane Hill, and we thought the story had ended; the family scattered.

Then they returned. The kits still nursing; the vixen still tolerant, if only just.

My granddaughter, Izzy, starts kindergarten next Thursday. Like the gray fox kits, she is on the verge of a new season. A first, fateful step toward independence. Unfortunately, I don’t have a game cam set up in the classroom and cannot chart that small, radiant crossing from my computer.

VIDEOS COURTESY OF DAVID PELLETIER

How long will this last?

Group scratch

Enough is enough

Group wrestle

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.