Category: Nature/Ecology

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Big Day: a bird list in haiku

The bird ID app Merlin kept urging me to participate in Global Big Day on Saturday, as I was walking in the Thickhead Wild Area near Boalsburg, PA. I finally decided to try to write a modern haiku for each bird I heard or saw. I failed, of course, but here are the passable efforts.

black-throated
blue warbling
here here HERE

ovenbird
the silence must be preserved
for a dome of leaves

wheezing pine
a black-and-white warbler’s
elegant stripes

giddy with
some sun-flooded bush
hooded warbler

mossy trail
a black-throated green warbler
dreaming out loud

last year’s leaves
still worth a rummage
eastern towhee

scratching an itch
without a pause in the song
chestnut-sided warbler

twisted limbs
the witchedy call of a common
yellowthroat

mourning dove
the dead oak encircled
by whispering birches

passing
a chickadee’s inspection
doddering birch stump

one monologue
leads to another
red-eyed vireos

tanager
husky-voiced singer
in scarlet

hairy woodpecker
the sun beginning to beat
on my neck

the buzz
of blossoming treetops
cerulean warbler

yellow warbler
the rhododendron’s one
yellow leaf

songs without birds
the brown thrasher’s
vast catalogue

blowdown calling
an American redstart back
from Venezuela

tufted titmouse
the hectoring tone
of my hunger

wood thrush
all the sweetness of time
flown by

Thickhead Wild Area, Rothrock State Forest
May 10, 2025 – Global Big Day

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Holidaisical

which naked branches make
a paper wasp’s antennae twitch

out scouting for a nesting place
hind legs outfitted in safety orange

at the top of an oak curled
like a scroll around its missing heart

two flickers perched a foot apart
engage in a bowing contest

a green sweat bee wallows
through the wind-blown hair on my arm

fresh from a blossoming shadbush
that bridal delicacy

a gnatcatcher’s two-note song
sounds both necessary and sufficient

i step aside for a dust-devil
made of dead leaves

it careens off for another hundred feet
and rises into the canopy

as if the devil intends to re-leaf
not with new growth but old

a project as certain to fail
as May Day will come

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Present Tense

disoriented by the mass slaughter of innocents
or the world as so many assumed they knew it vanishing
one might resolve to live only in the present tense

one could pay attention for example to the constant embrace of clothes
how air and water flow around and also through us
the way sound waves break against our eardrums
the proprioceptive intelligence of the feet

all the machinery of being human humming away
even for humans who lose or misplace their humanity
they must retain a muscle memory of how to crawl
the ground by and large continues to hold them up
lightning fails to edit them out of the story
prayers do not curdle in their unremarkable mouths
they fish with gilded forks through a bitter stew

shielded by double-glazed windows from the calls of birds
and soon enough the thunderous love-songs of 17-year locusts
currently still as pale as an army of spirits
tunnelling up through roots and rocks and mud

Posted on by Dave Bonta

The Cruelest Month

falling into the open
mouth of silence
vulture shadows

circling among boulders
of off-white quartzite
grown long in the tooth

fingers of ice linger
in the afternoon shadow
on a rock-walled well

where my face looms
among the far more
circumspect trees

some of whom are dead
but still standing on wind-
toughened roots

others yet to succumb
to infestation or pestilence
late frost or drought

here in the east
we can rarely climb
out of our own lives

one cannot vanish
into the thin air afforded to clouds
or the eyebrows of insomniacs

those who like it cold
have nowhere to go but north
we’re all migrants now

and our first green is in uniform
an antispring of plants
no native bug will touch

descending the mountain
i weave through a thorn scrub
wrought by forestry

and trillions of dollars
swifter than thought
encircling the earth

the silence broken
by a blue-headed vireo
singing his slow dream

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Wreckage

river in November light between bare woods and mountain

the wreck and not the story of the wreck
Adrienne Rich

Growing old under capitalism, we learn again and again how foolish we are to allow ourselves to become attached to any particular place. All will be destroyed for short-term profits. The kids who grew up playing in the creek that ran through an old pasture gone back to woods saw it all disappear under acres of parking lot for a new mall. The kids who grew up hanging out at the mall return home to find it derelict, the parking lot full of weeds from other continents.

And now, one supposes, there are children with skateboards and big dreams who love this new wasteland. Because when the wild is out of reach, the feral can serve in its place. The human need for unmanaged places is strong. Without regular contact with the more-than-human, our imaginations shrivel and we lose most capacity for self-reinvention, like large language models training on each other’s output, increasingly disconnected from the living flow.

Or perhaps the children are all scheduled up with structured playtime in safe and fenced-in spaces, and the only people out in the wasteland now are drug addicts and other unhappy campers. Under their heads as they sleep, the creek is breaking out of its rusty conduit. Ailanthus roots have found a fissure. It’s only a matter of time.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Empty-Handed

given back
to the forest
my walking stick

missing you
the blue
of a distant lake

almost April
maples redding up
for the breeze

walking home
the shush
that crushed stone makes

a raven’s croak
there’s nowhere to hide
from these blues

Posted on by Dave Bonta

War News

One of those crystal-clear days in early spring when you can fool yourself into thinking it’s warm because the sun is so bright. I hike up to a favorite spot for a thermos of tea. I’m reading War News II: 12/9/2023 to 6/3/2024, an excellent and searing collection by Beau Beausoleil.

war news
the cold boulder
at my back

Walking home, I have a terrible thought: in a time of great lies, words are losing their power to change hearts, including our own, and therefore those of us who are religious, however obscurely so, ought to consider switching from prayer to sacrifice. Something more than performative gestures must be at stake.

killdeerkilldeer
the smell of cow manure
somehow sweet

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Beachhead

putting my phone away
the plushness of the moss

at its greenest now
at the end of a hard winter

a butterfly dances past
like a lost carnival float

the naked trees sway
gray and weather-eaten

i find a habitable hush
in the shade of a pine

though from time to time
a moan interjects

the sound of friction
with a too-close neighbor

a wild lettuce seed drifts
on a pompon of down

up over the mountain
and out across the valley

where every raw patch
of plowed or scoured earth

calls to the migrant killdeer
as an unclaimed shore

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Thaw

a chaos of paths
stops me in my tracks

tumbleweed AKA windwitch
stuck in the icy crust

while moss and lichen
nearby are melting free

touseled but upright
with gray cups upraised

a crushed plastic water bottle
rests like a saint in its icy crypt

the ground shakes
from a coal train

one piece of passing graffiti says
in gothic letters GET OUT

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Meanwhile

crown shyness as they call it
saves the trees
from foreign entanglements

as shrinkwrapped
in ice they glitter
and shed dead limbs

now in my woodstove
a tongue of flame makes
a knot explode

smoke from my chimney
sinks to the ground
and ghosts off into the forest

where i soon follow
over the ice
with chains on my feet

seeking patches of snow
left behind by the wind
for news of spring

chipmunk forays
out of hibernation
the braided tracks of coyotes

bright green
scraps of moss
dug up by a squirrel