Pouring rain this morning, and I overslept--half the time dreaming fitfully about buying a new toothbrush, half the time listening to rain clattering on the porch roof and to white-breasted nuthatches conversing in the maple tree outside the window. According to Roger Tory Peterson, the song of the white-breasted nuthatch is "a rapid series of low, nasal, whistled notes on one pitch: whi, whi, whi, whi, whi, whi." Their note is "a nasal yank."

The ones outside my window mostly said, "Yank."

Usually we have more red-breasted than white-breasted nuthatches. Birdman Roger describes their note as "ank or enk, sounding like a baby nuthatch or a tiny tin horn." You'd think these sounds would be easy to confuse, but they're not. Even when mostly asleep during a loud rainstorm, I can tell a yank from an ank.

One bird I've been hoping to hear is the American woodcock. Tom likes to sing songs about the American woodcock to the tune of "American Woman." Perhaps that is why it avoids our yard. We saw one once, about a decade ago. It sat in the same pile of dried leaves for three days straight, and it looked a great deal like dried leaves, except for its pointy beak and dimwitted eye. American woodcocks do not exude intelligence. Birdman Roger tells me that, "at dusk in spring, [the male woodcock] utters a nasal beezp." I don't recall the woodcock in the leaf pile ever saying a thing. Perhaps it was a female, or perhaps it just forgot. Woodcocks look like the sort of animal that would forget how to say, "Beezp." They remind me of this really dumb cat I once had. If she went out into the yard and turned her back on the house, she'd forget where she was and start crying because she was lost. Dinah had no talents whatsoever, except for shedding. She was very, very good at shedding. Poor thing. Despite her developmental delays, she was extremely sweet, but she was entirely cowed by her roommate, Sebastian the ogre cat, the devil incarnate, the monster from the deep. Everyone was cowed by him. He was like Napoleon in cat form, except that he was bigger than Napoleon.