Quickening

Suddenly, with a flip of the calendar page, everything has changed amongst the birds.

Winter was a time to hunker down. 

Enormous flocks of Canada geese wintered with us, slumbering en masse at night on the iced lake, by day grubbing voraciously through a mantle of snow to pluck victuals from the turf. In their wake, a cacophony of churned earth and webbed foot prints.

Of a January vineyard morning, I would crunch through diamond-crusted snow before sunrise. 

At sunrise, coming to a small patch of open water, and the flotilla of ice where our swans slumber, I would feel like I'd entered a secret avian dream world: All is peace and crystalline beauty. 

The swans allowed a small trusted bevy of geese to sleep amongst them on their floating bed chamber, the rest banished to the lakeshore with the ducks. How very wise, I thought, to have these squawky sentries close at hand during the vulnerable silent hours.

During those peaceful winter mornings, I would observe that our ducks never sleep on the ice, except when there is a downy blanket of snow. On a snowy January morning, I arrived at sunrise to find our entire duck colony asleep on snowy ice. They rose with the sun, and begin chattering amongst themselves, waddling busily on the ice. (I think I could be content to watch ducks walk on ice all day.)

But change is afoot in the vineyard, the quickening of the year. 

Maple buds swelling against an April sky.

Skunk cabbage shoots rise steamily from the creekbed. 

Gliding raptors, aloft in a sky that is suddenly cerulean, dangle entrails of branches. 

On a rainy morning I notice our pair of mute swans display a newfound interest in golden willow branches that litter the lawn.

These quickening days, and an ever changing sky:

To the South, golden rays, impossible blue skies, fluffy white clouds.

Northward, impending wintry nebula, dark and foreboding. 

On many days snow flurries mixed with drizzle and warmth. 

This fleeting season, marked by the mysterious arrival of impossibly vivid ducks, with crimson necks. 

Raw, windswept March has just passed, when you would experience all of the seasons in just one day.

But gone now is March, and with it, the mysterious crimson ducks that visit each winter, then disappear as quickly as the whiteout flurries that sometimes materialized to displace a mid-afternoon sun.

The day the crimson ducks departed marked a noticeable change in avian behavior. 

All winter everyone got along, but the day the ducks left, our territorial male swan was suddenly bound and determined to keep a pair of Canada geese from nesting under a cherry tree. I could swear they are the exact same pair that tried to nest here last year, under a pine tree that is now gone. 

As the days lengthen, gone are the large colonies of ducks who gobbled at the swan chow bowl on frigid winter days.

Gone the riotous gaggle of geese who slumbered on the ice by night and rooted riotously through vineyard rows for daytime grub.

Gone the marauding robins who came out of nowhere to strip to bare twigs a crabapple tree which had somehow held its fruit through Christmas.

On these suddenly sunny April days, the birds have all paired off:

The swans daub a nest from mud and leaves and willow branches in a swampy finger of the lake.

An iridescent mallard and his handsome brown speckled bride toddle about the shrubbery at sunrise, looking for a place where in a few weeks she may deposit her eggs.

A pair of elegant mourning doves coo beside an old grape press in the rose bushes, seemingly grateful for the now bare earth on which to roost.

There is something to be said for days spent tending a vineyard. 

Even days that sometimes start with pelting sleet and a glaze of ice. 

And especially days during this magic season, when the year quickens perceptibly, and avian behavior takes a marked seasonal turn. 

An entire complex avian world goes about its seasons on the shore of this lake, and we feel privileged to be here to watch it unfold.

And throughout it all, in every season, a solitary Great Blue Heron swoops overhead, knowingly. (And sometimes, I kind of get the feeling that heron is orchestrating the whole thing.)

Skunk cabbage steamily rises.