I love tits
Concurrent with my transplanting vegetable seedlings into garden beds too soon again this year because I apparently never learn, is the arrival of the springtime chorus in the trees. Tiny pepper transplants and I are witness to the return of our summer bird menagerie. Yes, I am a birder. I never leave the house without binoculars.
Having a garden surrounded on three sides by woods makes binoculars as essential as a cultivator and horse poop. There are plenty of birds that never leave our woods in winter: woodpeckers, titmice, nuthatches, cardinals, doves, bluejays and chickadees. Dark-eyed juncos pick seeds and bugs off the ground every October till April when they relinquish their niche to chipping sparrows for six months and go somewhere else. It’s like the winter shift and the summer shift.
But spring into summer – prime gardening time – there is an explosion of color and sound in the air and in the trees. For those who don’t know, birders stop what they are doing when there is a notable bird song in the air. We cautiously, casually wander in its direction, binoculars in hand, hoping to catch a glimpse because it might sound like a Nashville warbler, for example. Birders want a confirmed visual because, for one thing, a Nashville warbler has a yellow to white belly, a blue-gray head and an olive back – pretty spectacular for a tweety bird and a delight to witness – but also so we can put it on our list. Birders keep lists.
I have 294 birds on my life list, a modest number for veteran birders, and 99 were sighted on this property. It’s a challenge to cultivate the collard bed and not watch flashy red summer tanagers and iridescent indigo buntings singing in the trees. Tanagers eat wasps and buntings eat insects, seeds and berries. Somebody needs to eat the bugs on my asparagus.
A black and white warbler sounds like a rusty hinge and it can scamper along the bottom of a branch like a nuthatch. Goldfinches are little gold birds with black tails and wings, and they sport a black toupee. A group of them is called a charm and they prefer thistle seeds.
Brown thrashers are slightly bigger than a mockingbird but rufous-brown with spots on a light breast and they have a long tail. They are loud and treat the woods to a series of phrases like a rapid-fire best hits of other birds, yet they are not imitative like a mockingbird. They will run across the lawn grazing for snacks.
Similar but a bit smaller is a Swainson’s thrush. It’s mousy brown with spots on its breast, but its song in like a magic flute spiraling down an echo chamber. A happy gardener getting dirtier by the second can do worse than be serenaded by thrushes, thrashers, tanagers, buntings, cardinals, warblers plus the regulars.
A couple weeks ago there was a new ascending buzzy twittering. Put down tools, picked up binoculars, carefully approached the vicinity. Sounded high in a particular tree, but no visual. Stood in a sheltered place, watched diligently … only buzzy twittering. Then movement, quick glimpse, binoculars trained toward the foliage, and then … voila! a tiny tweety bird making buzzy twitters. Yellow throat, blue-gray back, wing bars and rusty chest band – that’s a northern parula in my woods!
Very unusual, but it has been so regular lately I don’t even go look for it anymore because this is the time of year the woods host a pitch of Baltimore orioles and a gross of rose-breasted grosbeaks. Imagine the visual of orioles, grosbeaks, tanagers and buntings in one binocular view. How am I supposed to get any gardening done?
Did I mention pine warblers and cedar waxwings …