Kay’s Birding Blog

This is supposed to be the time of year when things grow quiet in the bird world.  In past years, they have.  But not this year.  For several weeks, we have been inundated with the sounds of several blue jay families, bouncing around outside our home and scolding everything that moves.  Much sweeter and more welcome sounds (sorry, blue jay lovers, but your birds screech and squawk), drift down from a host of eastern kingbirds foraging from the tops of trees as they prepare to leave for points south.

Rose-breasted Grosbeak

There are still scolding wrens, mewing catbirds and a couple of orioles chattering in the serviceberry bushes.  Families of rose-breasted grosbeaks feed on sunflowers and serviceberries.  Then, this week, there were several very special surprises:  First was the melodic call of a veery from our woods one evening.  The next afternoon, a great crested flycatcher came in, whistling its “Breep, breep, breep.”  He landed, facing away from us, on a branch in a black cherry tree, right outside our living room window.   Then he turned into the sun, his rufous wings highlighted by the light and his breast glowing a bright lemon hue.  He hung around until the end of day, snagging flying insects, and snatching the occasional serviceberry.

American Redstart

But the best bird experience of all was the day that American redstarts appeared and sang their way through our wetland for the entire afternoon.  These beautiful black and orange warblers are regular nesters on Charter Sanctuary.  Hearing them communicating reminded us - as if we needed any reminders - of why we bought this place sixteen years ago.

“Aristotle was, shall we say, a creative thinker, even by the freewheeling standards of ancient Greece.  In addition to declaring that horsehair turned into living worms, he believed that birds hibernated in holes in the ground each winter.

Baltimore Oriole

“It’s easy to laugh at Aristotle, because we know better.  The truth about migration is that birds are conjured up from the soft April air of a Gulf Coast sky.  The blue is rolled up to make indigo buntings and cerulean warblers, the fog folds in on itself to birth gray catbirds and gnatcatchers, while the orange clouds at dusk give of themselves to create orioles.  And the liquid gold of the afternoon sun is measured out, drop by precious drop, to form male prothonotary warblers.  Once the sky is full to bursting with these new-made wonders, it lets them fall like snow on the land.  Poetic hogwash, you say?  Suit yourself.  I’ve seen it happen.”

Prothonotary Warbler

The above lyrical passage is from Scott Weidensaul’s wonderful work, Living on the Wind; Across the Hemisphere with Migratory Birds.  I first read it years ago, after attending a birding event where he spoke.  Although I’ve also read other books by Scott (Of a Feather: A Brief History of American Birding, Return to Wild America:  A Yearlong Search for the Continent’s Natural Soul, and The Ghost with Trembling Wings:  Science, Wishful Thinking  and the Search for Lost Species), this one book, Living on the Wind is by far my favorite.  When I recently I picked it up again to read it through, it became clear why that is so when I read the last paragraph of the preface:

“This book covers a lot of ground.  Over the course of more than six years, I traveled virtually the length of the hemisphere, logging nearly seventy thousand miles by jet, car, bush plane, sailing ketch, tundra buggy, dugout canoe, horseback, and on foot - yet traveling fewer miles than a single small sandpiper would in its short lifetime, propelled only by muscle and the instinct to migrate.”

Living on the Wind demonstrates clearly, often with heart stopping detail and always in beautiful prose, what these remarkable creatures endure in their travels between continents.  It is a part of their lives we too often forget about.

Everyone who cares about migrating birds and their collective futures, should read this book.  Doing so makes us conscious not just of their migrational challenges, but also reasons for their population declines.  Weidensaul makes care deeply about these brave travelers enough to act on their behalf.