4:47 a.m. (twenty-two minutes before sunrise). Fifty-nine degrees, wind South two miles per hour, gusting to four (not enough to keep mosquitoes at bay, which are everywhere and annoying). Clear but hazy sky, end to end. Soft peach sunrise, colors enhanced and prolonged by Canadian wildfire smoke. The sun itself, a bright orange orb, holds color well into the sky. Though far from as intense, I am reminded of Los Angeles, circa 1965, when the air was dull brown, a mix of car exhaust and industrial chemicals, smelled like burnt toast, and often obscured the Coast Range from backyard North Hollywood. No smell of smoke this morning, no hills obscured, but there's a profound visual effect on the landscape as if looking at the world through gauze.

Starflower and false Solomon's seal in bloom. Red columbine, still in flower. The meadow flowers begin to light up—bees have more to work with.

Morning total: twenty-seven species (some noisier than others).

Woke to chatty eastern phoebes, not the American robins, sobered by smoke or family matters. Hermit thrush and veery pull their weight, voices emerging from behind the green veil. Great crested flycatchers. Blackburnian warblers, song subtle as the breeze. Ovenbird screams. Tufted titmouse, clipped version of Pe-ter, Pe-ter, Pe-ter-Pe-ter; now here, here, here as though calling a meeting to order.

Both nuthatches. Chestnut-sided and yellow warblers. Brown-headed cowbird and red-winged blackbird.

Both neighborhood vireos, red-eyed and blue-headed, sing from either side of the road—motor-mouth red-eyed releases four phrases for every blue-headed—eventually, the blue-headed stops. Red-eyed doesn't know when to quit. Can't quit. Compelled to sing, sunrise to sunset, fifteen to twenty thousand repetitions a day. Even the sun grows weary.

Raven heads east, through the smoky haze, croaks. Deer bounds cross the road into the heart of the tick infestation.

Early Summer Proclamations: gray treefrog calls among the aspen leaves. Green frog, the edge of the pond.

Ensemble of Trillers: chipping sparrow, dark-eyed junco, pine warbler.

Department of Pianissos: cedar waxwing, Blackburnian warbler, brown creeper.

Department of Fortissimos: northern house wren, American crow, blue jay, ovenbird.

One chickadee in lilac, quietly whistling as though auditioning for next spring. Four others are a swirl of activity.

Barred owls, silent for more than a month. Nest box up and empty. I have five weeks to find them before my grandkids arrive ... and request an owl.

Ode to a Neighbor

Brown creeper, slowly, methodically creeps up the trunk of an old sugar maple.

Checks crevices for spiders, cocoons, and insect eggs. Slender, curved bill scrutinizes bark Like water-witcher scrutinizes ground, Probing, picking, probing, picking. Tail, woodpecker-stiff, braced against the maple. Around and around. Always up, nuthatch in reverse, A corkscrew search for food.

Dainty, delicate songbird. Not much to it. Looks like a piece of loose bark. Colored like a dried leaf, brown and streaked, light underneath. Ochre band on wings.

Sounds like an errant hearing aid, high and thin, barely audible, in the vocal range of thought. Makes a kinglet or a Blackburnian warbler sound like Axl Rose. Louder than an ant’s footsteps, quieter than a mime.

A loner, an unorthodox little bird that keeps to himself.

Brown creeper flits from one tree to the next. Wanders up and around … now I see him, now I don’t. Now I see him again.

Nearby, four chickadees in flux, dashing and calling, investigating everything that isn’t a creeper. Stonewall. Lilacs. Branches. Pine needles. Twig tips. I stick with brown creeper … dog couldn't care less.

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 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. 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 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—which appeared here on Substack. Since the 25 August 2021 post, I 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 2025.

Jennette Fournier's illustrations, many of which are originals (including an otter, a bobcat, chickadees, and a black bear), a playful Winnie-the-Pooh-esque map, and a commissioned watercolor cover grace the book.

From: Seven Days

The Promise of Sunrise: Finding Solace in a Broken World

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 author'svin's wLevin'scan be extraordinarily vivid: Coyotes "hurl the" r voices at the crescent moon"; a bobc" t has a face "like a s" iled, fraying softball"; chicka" ees are "four mae" tros 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.