Still Dawn

This morning I notice the stillness. In the fog of a new day, I hear what has become mere background noise, the fluid chorus of chirping crickets, which passes for silence this time of year.

"By September, the day breaks with little help from birds," writes the conservationist Aldo Leopold in A Sand County Almanac.

Leopold's line makes me notice the truth: The day dawns quietly now, without the raucous morning chorus of cardinals and robins and jays. "The disappointment I feel on these mornings of silence perhaps shows that things hoped for have a higher value than things assured," Leopold writes, explaining how he feels on days he does not hear a covey of quail.

I am not disappointed by the lack of bird call, but I am made pensive by it. There is something in the dawn chorus that does my heart good. Birds are onto something; they sense hazards before we do. When they quiet down, I listen up.