THE NEAR COLORLESS sky and the gusts tugging at the tender green leaves would have looked unpromising if not for the days of grim pounding rain they followed. Puffy coats were out again. Three kinds of swallows flashed their white or rusty bellies as they skimmed above the water. The decaying remains of a balloon swayed at the end of a yard or so of ribbon, which traced a tangled path through little branches to where a robin had woven the far end into its nest atop a limb. A rat ambled along the shore, foraging in the open. A redstart flared the brilliant orange on its wings and tail then darted to another perch and another, holding each pose just long enough to defy a photographer before finally settling down. A black-and-white warbler flew down to briefly share a rock with a turtle. The birds kept coming one after another or all at once, as did the birders trying to register them all: the black face of a yellowthroat, the pink legs of a Louisiana waterthrush. A black-crowned night heron shook itself once and settled back down, pale and huge up in a tree. “We saw a turtle! We saw a turtle!” children shouted. The white spot of the sun faded and the wind got colder. A rivulet was coming out of the rocks and trickling onto the mud, speckled with fallen petals, between shore and water. It spread out into puddles that barely kept flowing on. One of the black-and-white warblers came scuttling right up around the branch to the robin’s nest, and the robin exploded out, screaming and ruddy, to chase it away. White daffodils with low yellow rings pointed the stars of their faces this way and that against the dense green field of their stalks, in some sort of vexillological madness. “Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum,” a tiny child called out, passing in through the park gate. Mugwort clung to the rocks. It felt as if there might be flecks of returning drizzle on the wind.
