Here Come the Summer Birds!

categories: Cocktail Hour / Getting Outside

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Brown Thrasher

Today was a warm one in western Maine, sixty-some degrees and sunny.  Warm enough for the bugs to wake, which means the arrival of the breeding crowd, our summer birds. I took the usual hour’s walk in the woods this morning and to the stream, a great meeting place of forest and field, stream and sandbar.  And what singing!  It always takes me a minute to remember my birdsongs, but they do come back.  Black and White Warbler like a squeaky wheel.  Common Yellowthroat, witchety-witchety-wichety.  That kind of insistent and snotty-seeming and much-repeated Chestnut-Sided Warbler song: I’m a chestnut sided, what d’ya think of that?  And the oven birds are back: Teacher! Teacher! Teacher!  Also a Black-Throated Green Warbler, plenty to say.

Catbird in the thicket, singing quietly to itself in the voices of others.  Then its cousin, Brown Thrasher, long phrases at full voice, quotes from all the birds he’s ever met, including a perfect blue jay keening.

Bank Swallows, Tree Swallows.  No blue bird as yet.

Woodcock in winnowing flights till midnight in the field next door.  Killdeer by day.

Common Mergansers, Hooded Mergansers, Mallards, Wood Ducks, Canada Geese.

Finally a Solitary Sandpiper, alone, of course, stopping over for a week or so, if history holds, on its way much farther north.

Dozens and dozens more species to come in the next few weeks…  I love watching for them.