July 31: Blueberry harvest

At the winnower

many hands glean the berries--

there's a metaphor here.

 

 

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May 2: Before the rain

With pending rain, I decided today's walk needed to be faster than my usual slog up Mount Battie. So I hit the trail at Beech Hill Preserve, which is less steep, and tried to hurry. But then I ran into my friend Brian, who walks there daily; he'd had similar thoughts about trying to beat the rain. (He posts a bird report every day from Beech Hill, in poetry form in the past few weeks.) So I spent more time than I'd planned, in the drizzle, but I didn't mind. And I don't think he did either.

Fast morning hike
trying to beat the rain
til I run into an old friend.

November 27: Beech Hill

Along the trail up--

sharing fragrant bayberries

with an amazed child.

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July 7: Blueberry wine

Misty summer night--

drinking blueberry port

Jackie made last summer.

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May 12: In the mist

A scene from "Wuthering Heights"--

misty barrens,

unseen sparrow singing.

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February 1: Embracing the snow

My husband and I snowshoed up Beech Hill in Rockport this morning, in hopes of soaking up as much sunshine as we could before the next snowstorm rolls in tomorrow. The snow was beautiful--pure, fresh, dazzling, patterned with striking shadows and animal tracks.

 

Snowshoeing on Beech Hill--

our path intersects

that of a snowshoe hare.

 

 

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November 15: Across the bay

From atop Beech Hill--

snowy mountains, ice blue bay,

calls of winter finches.

 

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September 13: Aurora Borealis

Up on Beech Hill--

beer bottles from last night's

aurora viewing party.

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August 22: Summer on the hill

Beers on the porch.
Waxwings catch flies in the field,
fly off together.

August 9: Sapsucker

Hiked up Beech Hill today with my birder friend Brian, who goes up there almost every day. He pointed out a pattern of sap wells that a sapsucker had made a few weeks ago, and sure enough, a young sapsucker--hard to pick out in its drab juvenile plumage--was there feeding at them. A hummingbird also buzzed by to check them out, as well as many bee-type insects. A veritable community feeding station.

Sapsucker fledgling
sips from its parents' sap wells
surrounded by bees

August 8: Winnowing

I spent the afternoon selling organic blueberries at the Land Trust's blueberry stand on Beech Hill, as the berry crew worked busily behind me feeding boxes of freshly raked berries through the winnower (which removes the leaves and greenies). Boxes and boxes of berries, berries rolling past on the conveyer, squished on the floor, piling up in buckets...

 

The winnowers

will dream streams of berries,

hear their rolling thunder.

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February 17: Tracks in the snow

Snowshoed up Beech Hill in Rockport this afternoon with my friend Brian and his dog Jack. The trail up hadn't seen human traffic since this most recent storm. But we observed tracks of many other creatures that had left their mark on the fresh snow: coyote, snowshoe hare, squirrel, mouse, the interweaving paths of a flock of turkeys.

I step over tracks
of many turkeys, each bird
leaving its own trail.

January 10: Woodpecker tree

At Beech Hill Preserve today came upon a large dead tree, still standing, which has been vigorously attended to by a Pileated Woodpecker this winter. The bark-less trunk is pitted with extensive excavation work, and piles of fresh wood chips surround its snowy base.

Every day the woodpecker
returns for more.
I understand that hunger.

May 22: Birds in fog

Sorry, I've been slipping up on the haiku-a-day lately. These early mornings birding followed by busy work days don't help my creative energy at day's end. Nor does being on an island with poor Internet connectivity, as I was last weekend and will be this coming weekend. But I'm never gone for long!

****

This morning, I led a bird walk at Beech Hill Preserve in Rockport. Yes, it was pouring. Yes, we all got soaked. But there's something so invigorating about hearing thrushsong in the misty distance as we pause on the muddy trail. Or seeing a towhee looming in the fog, its striking black, white, and rufous patterning barely discernable, his song magnified somehow by the moisture in the air.

Blueberry flowers drip rain.
Magnified by fog,
towhee sings loudly.

Eastern Towhee. Photo: Brian Willson.

February 20: Birthday Robins

Some years on my birthday I've tried to see the number of species that equal my age. The older I get, the less easy it has been to approach this goal--especially given that my birthday falls during a time of year when it's not easy to find 20 species, let alone a number in the high 40s. Today I didn't even try.

But I did experience a cool bird moment. My friend Brian and I hiked up Beech Hill in Rockport and spent the entire walk virtually surrounded by robins. We first noticed a big cluster of them--we counted close to 50--feeding in a patch of sumacs. Then when we got to the stone hut at the summit, we observed them in the field below us which the wind had swept clear of snow, carrying on that "walking and listening" thing that they do in our yards in the spring and summer. Granted some patches of ground were soft and had clearly thawed, but there couldn't have been much in the way of worms to be found.

As we walked back down the hill, we were in a sense following the flock as they flew around us to a lower, cleared field, clucking and making soft trilling sounds. We noticed a tight cluster of about a dozen huddled together under a trailhead kiosk, kicking at piles of dead leaves. I'm sure they were getting lucky finding caterpillars and grubs that seek winter shelter among the leaf litter. As we approached this kinetic flock, it circled around and flew back up the hill to renew its progression through the fields and wooded edges.

American Robin perched on remnants of the historic stone gate at Beech Hill, Rockport.  Photo by Brian Willson.

Winter robins' breasts so red
in the barren fields.
I think of my heart.

November 22: Thanksgiving

Things I am thankful for (so far) today:

Being awakened by my affectionate cat
Blue sky
the New York Times crossword puzzle
Walk up Beech Hill with my mother, sister, and two nieces
Two mice mating, playing, or otherwise squabbling in the weeds, trailside
My niece's fascination with bayberries
The scent of crushed bayberries
My other niece's joy in banging two rocks together
Distant red of autumn-burnished blueberry fields
Good health
Free time for my husband to write
A little free time for me to write too
Not losing the Thanksgiving turkey, brining on my parents' porch this morning, to a fox
Crows on the lawn
Cat's amusing attempts to jump through the windows at birds and squirrels

Prayer flags and dry leaves
stir in the breeze,
share blessings.

November 12: Blue birds, bleak sky

The other night I dreamt I saw three bluebirds together on a branch. Then I saw them in real life.

Yesterday I indulged in birding for the entire day, moving around the Midcoast to some of my favorite spots. I started off by spending several hours on Beech Hill, hiking all the trails, scanning fields and woods along the way. But the highlight of that outing was at the very beginning, when I was walking alongside the first, lower blueberry field. It was mown recently, and that seemed to have attracted a flock of bluebirds. The strikingly bright birds were foraging in the field, perching in trees in small clusters together along its edge, and even singing. On a bleak November morning with a frost-white sky, posed on leafless branches and amid sere, cropped blueberry plants, the bluebirds were easily the most vivid aspects of the landscape. I watched them for a long time, and when I finally looked away and continued on up the hill, I could hear their songs echoing behind me.

Even more beautiful
than birds in a dream--
bluebirds on bleak barrens.

August 26: Coyotes

Last night was the perfect night for a party. One of my Land Trust's board members, Gray, and I threw one at Beech Nut, a historic sod-roofed stone hut atop Beech Hill in Rockport, in the middle of our 295-acre preserve there. The party hosts were the lucky winners of the Land Trust's Raffle this spring; first prize was this party. The clear blue sky and mild temps were perfect for a gathering like this. We could see across the bay all the way to the mountains of Acadia NP, and inland, the Camden Hills glowed as the sun set among them.

After sunset, as the pink in the sky deepened and spread, the guests headed down the hill, leaving the two of us to clean up in the growing dark. (The hut has no electricity.) At one point I was out on the verandah dumping ice when I heard a siren. I watched to see if the lights of the police car were visible below. Suddenly the wail of the siren seemed to multiply. It took me a second to realize that a pack of coyotes had joined their voices to the siren chorus. I called Gray outside to hear it. She was startled by how close they were and by how many there seemed to be. I could pick out puppy yips and full howls, probably a mixed family group. Such a stirring, chilling sound rising from the forest at the base of the hill. The coyotes had made their presence known.

I was reminded how once, in a mountain canyon of Arizona, a fighter jet flew low up the canyon in some kind of maneuver and set off all the coyotes that had heretofore been invisible around me. I was also reminded of a recent conversation at Bread Loaf, where I've often heard coyotes, about how eastern coyotes pack up more than western ones because they have more wolf genes. The person I was talking to brought up the relatively recent incident of a woman being attacked and killed by a coyote pack in Nova Scotia.

As we left the hill and drove off last night, we were stopped by a police car--one of 12, I was told later. The cop told us to keep our eyes open for a guy in shorts and a t-shirt. No, he wasn't armed or dangerous, just on the lam. Nonetheless, as we drove past the coyote-filled woods, I know I'd have felt safer with all those "song dogs" than with one human fugitive.

They can't resist singing along
with the sirens--
coyotes revealed.

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July 29: Blueberries

Tonight I know I'll be dreaming of blueberries. Even now I can still see them in my mind, piles of the blue-red berries cascading off the winnower in a never-ending stream...

Coastal Mountains Land Trust, for which I work, runs an organic blueberry farm at its Beech Hill Preserve in Rockport. For about a month in the middle of each summer, we harvest the fruit to sell; the blueberry sales thus support the upkeep of the preserve, a popular place to hike and observe nature (it's on the Maine Birding Trail too--stop #31!). Although today was my day off, I don't often get to spend time at the hill when the blueberry harvest is going on. That's not my department. So I volunteered to work at the farm stand for the day just to be a small part of one of our more exciting and enjoyable projects.

Mostly I sold quarts of berries to preserve visitors while the farm workers winnowed. Our winnower is a behemoth of a machine that sucks in boxes of blueberries just as they were raked in the fields, with all the twigs, leaves, unripe berries, and other detritus, and spits out whole, clean blueberries at the other end. Here's a photo of me helping out a few years ago with the end of the winnowing process, quality-checking the final products (i.e. removing the rejects by hand) as the berries roll past one last time into waiting boxes:

In the photo above it doesn't look like there are a lot of berries there, but that's only because they had to slow the process way down for me, a non-professional, so I could more thoroughly pick out the unwanted berries that made it through the winnowing process and properly meet our quality standards. The farm workers--today a team of young women who have worked for us for several summers and really know what they're doing--can pick through a full conveyor belt of berries moving at a very fast speed while talking on their cell phones. The end result is quarts of super-clean berries of very high quality. What you don't see are the buckets and bins full of the reject berries and other material, twigs and little green berries and squished berries that stain everything--the machine, the workers, the floor, the boxes--purple.

To occupy myself today when not selling quarts, chatting with preserve visitors, or replenishing quarts from the winnower, I picked through several buckets full of the rejected berries, etc. to get myself a full quart. It took me most of the afternoon, and my fingers are now stained a deep purple. I'm literally marked by the experience. But I've got more fresh berries in the refrigerator, ample reward for today's work on the farm. 

Fingers tattooed blue.
Rolling berries, more berries,
when I close my eyes.

July 12: Summer clouds

During this idyllic spell of summer weather, the clouds have been spectacular--big, fluffy cumulus clouds that roll across the sky's blue canvas, adding texture and dimension to its bright expanse without lingering too long, blocking the sun, or releasing any rain.

Beech Nut, the sod-roofed stone hut on Beech Hill Preserve, and clouds

Clouds amass above the Megunticook River, as viewed from my office

Blue screen, white brushstrokes--
a folding Japanese screen,
"Sky with clouds and birds."