Third Spring is True Spring

Migration has been slow, very slow. Day after day is bright and spring like, but winds are from the north as a fair-weather system blocks the warm fronts from moving up the east coast to bring southwest winds and tropical migrants riding those winds. As far as the birds are concerned it is no problem at all. The nights are fairly calm and the moon is full, ideal conditions for a nice, paced, easy passage. They can move a hundred miles each night and find budding trees with worms and insects waiting in the morning. A following wind only pushes them north too early.

Second Spring is well along with kinglets, blue-headed vireos, winter wrens, hermit thrushes, towhees, flickers and sapsuckers all arriving to fill the air with song and paint the fields and forests with color and movement. Even the early warblers are here by the end of April, the myrtle (yellow-rumped), the pine and the palm. But these all come from their winter quarters in the southern United States. Where are the star players from the tropics?

In true Spring the warbler family takes the stage. There are twenty-one species of tropical warblers that have New England as their destination, and all are a delight to the eye and ear. I am waiting for one of the earliest of them to arrive and I am getting impatient. The large willow tree in my back yard is already in full bud, but there is no yellow warbler to grace its drooping branches.

The yellow warbler is the standard of its family, the basic warbler that is widespread throughout North America and even has look alike cousins that remain in the tropics to breed. They are very common along streams and in wet areas with a mix of tall and small trees and low bushes. A pair has nested in my back yard each year, the male using the tall willow as its favorite feeding and singing tree. The first day he sings is the first day of third Spring, the true Spring.

At the end of April the yard was still devoid of his song, so I decided to go in search of Spring. There were many places where the yellow warbler could be found and I stopped at some of them. Everywhere the robins sang, but the loud greeting of true Spring did not reach my ears. It would be so "sweet, sweet, sweet to meet you." Those are the words some use to remember the song of the yellow warbler.

Finally I reached a place in Feeding Hills that used to be a farm run by the county. Now it is abandoned and grown over with small trees and brush as well as groves of larger trees. The invasive multiflora rose is the dominant plant. The land is very low and wet with Philo Brook running through the center, a wild eden amidst the suburbs of Springfield.  

On a May census I visit this wonderful hundred acres, and it is always loaded with yellow warblers, usually about twenty or more males all vying for the prime habitat. This offered the best chance for one male to have pushed himself harder and reached home ahead of his rivals.

A hedge of solid rose bushes lines an upper meadow, but along the way down the hill a few taller saplings line the hedge. You can look across the valley from here to see the towers of downtown Springfield and the Wilbraham hills beyond. As I paused to look at the view and bask in the bright warm sun rising above, the notes of Spring reached my ears, as clear and perfect as any ballad.

Not one, but two yellow warblers were chasing each other from tree to tree, each stopping briefly to issue the vocal challenge. This is mine, one said. No, mine the other replied. How ironic that only two birds had returned early among all the hundreds that are coming, and these two were sparring neighbors from the previous year.

There was no need to show their color, since they are almost all yellow, but the bright red streaking of their breasts was flashed as they threw up their heads and sang. Spring had come from the sunny south to claim this New England hedgerow as its home.