It is an achingly beautiful and fragrant summer morning. The crickets creak on, not yet silent in the sun. A tiny, odd bit of something glitters in the sun shining low on the cement patio. The birds are somewhere else this morning, two or three backyards down the block. 

Yesterday on a late afternoon walk I startled a whole flock of goldfinches out of a bush next to a house on my west-east path. Or rather, it was they who startled me--so small, so yellow and so many. Their excited chirping was decidedly different from the house sparrows I'm used to in the morning. 

I read Better Living Through Birding, by Christian Cooper, recently, and also installed the Merlin Bird ID app on my phone. You hit the button on the app and it listens and records the sounds around you. Bird names pop up. I got an unusually long list this morning (five possibilities) but the persistence crickets are creating interference. Meanwhile I hear a phone alarm going off across the street as a neighbor leaves for work or school. There's a plaintive sound coming from something that I can't see high in the maple tree, while a squirrel on a low bough has fixed his attention on the tree's trunk. He's been completely still for several minutes, stretched from tail to chin to nose. What's he watching for? A juicy insect? A small bird? Something else that's alive? Me walking around the base of the tree bothers him (her?) not at all, though now he's found a new position, alert but upside down on the tree's central trunk. I do not have his patience, this morning, maybe not ever. He watches, I search for words. 

And now he's gone where I can't see.