Thursdays with Becky

 Lately Becky has been taking Thursdays off so we can get the groceries as soon as the store opens and avoid the crowds. Some weeks we leave at o'dark thirty and head out to see the sun up at some mountain place of wild magic.

We went this week to a place I have named Benham Marsh in honor of a sweet lady I met there and her late son. It was cold and bright with just a touch of morning mist. Ravens were crying their harsh, strong song and a faint twitter had just begun in the edges of the woods.

As the sun crested the horizon the colors popped out one by one. The burgundy and blaze of the Red Maples in the marsh. Just the beginning of orange and crimson in the Sugar Maples. Plenty of green for background, buttercup and bronze in the low-lying bushes, and birds everywhere. So many birds! 

We found 30 species, from a Common Loon calling down on Peck's Lake to a Wilson's Warbler I pished out of the shrubbery. The bushes and treetops were buzzing with warblers, but in their fall plumage ID is tough. I got a few of them though, before they flitted off over the forest, feeding as they went.

Beaver Lodge

Not one car passed during the the nearly two hours that we stayed. I reveled in the cold, wild, beauty until the sun burned off the last of the early morning haze and it was time to rejoin humanity down in town.

Suddenly I find that I love Thursdays...they were formerly just another day in the calendar of retired life. Now they are plumb fantastic.

Immature male Common Yellowthroat