The Kellogg Columns

When the sun disappears behind the turning earth, most of us think of retiring to our homes and beds. The small songbirds of the forests do as well, nestling among the thick branches of an evergreen bough or the tangle of a thick bush to rest through the darkness until the inexorable cycling makes the sun reappear on our other horizon.

But there is another cycle that interrupts that regular routine, the cycle of the tilted earth around the sun, showing first its northern face to the furnace of light and heat on one half of its orbit, then the southern face during the other half. Our two-faced planet is fickle but fair in its willingness to share the sunbath of summer.

We have had our time, and now the creatures must either endure or flee, following the rays of the sun. To do this, the songbirds must forego their sleep and work through most of the night. As darkness deepens, they now come alive, restless and eager, driven by some force within their brains.

Families launch into the moonlit night and rise above the trees, calling to each other and joining with other songbirds that all feel the urge to fly. They prefer to start on a night when the sky is clear, the moon is bright, and the winds are gentler, but they do not know what weather awaits them farther down the flyway.

First, the birds that must reach the distant tropics begin the journey in late August or September. These are the flycatchers, thrushes, vireos, and warblers, who need insects in vast numbers to fuel their tiny bodies. They have found plenty here in the heat of late summer, and they have gorged, adding ounces of precious fat, which they burn as they work the night through.

Our own nesting birds leave us quickly and they are visitors to some other shores or ridges to our south, but the breeding birds of Quebec first head for us, dropping into our trees as dawn approaches. They need a quick nap in the cool of the morning before the sun rouses the insects to life and spreads them across the banquet table of forest leaves.

Then you can rise yourself at a pleasant hour and walk in the woods to find these flocks of feeding songbirds. Sometimes you may not meet a single bird for quite a while, and hear only an occasional chip in the forest, since the full songs of Spring are only a memory.

Then suddenly a leaf will move or a twig tremble, then another and another, and the trees are dripping with busy diners. This is the time it is most valuable to purse your lips and make a loud pishing sound, for the birds will come closer with curiosity and alarm, though never ceasing the endless search for tiny worms.

The treetop migrants move slowly through the woods, sampling each banquet table in turn. There is a redstart, fanning its showy tail, either an orange and black male, or more often the yellow and gray of females and young birds. Then a few magnolia warblers or black-throated green warblers come out, slightly duller in their fall plumage, but still showing telltale colors.

Even more welcome is the sight of a parula or a Cape May warbler, which breed farther north and are seen here only on migration. Each warbler or vireo species carries its own special flag of colors, sometimes vibrant, often yellow, but always distinct.

The flycatchers and thrushes are plainer, and some are so similar you need a long, close study and perfect light to tell the difference. But they are more likely to perch in the open, the flycatchers sitting still on the bare branches and the thrushes lurking quietly near the forest floor.

Many of these birds fly as far as they can, and often they reach the coast, where they pile up in larger numbers. Then you can find fifty birds in one tree and hundreds in a morning's walk, with a few rare ones as part of the mix. Search for them while you can, for they will be gone when the frosty chills descend upon us.

I stood still and gazed out at the green hills around me. They rested gently together, layered like a wrinkled carpet, worn and ragged from ages of tramping by gigantic gods. They stretched into the far edges of my eyesight, where here and there a massive mountain would rise, reduced to a tiny mole hill on the canvas of a much vaster horizon.

Here the sky was the true world, and you no longer wondered why men thought the ancient gods dwelt there, looking down on the downtrodden earth from their cities in the clouds. I began to shudder at the thought of one appearing, setting a giant's heel down on trees and creatures alike. The trees might spring back like moss, but a single creature like me would be squashed into the soil to become fodder for the worms.

There are creatures who fly in this dome of sky, and we are watching for them as they come out of the horizon and zoom past us on wings we cannot ride. The legend say that a bold young man called Icarus tried to ride into the sky with borrowed wings, but the sun dissolved the waxen sinews and sent him spiraling down.

The birds grew wings from their flesh and reached the heavens on their own, but found no cities there, or gods either. Although they have mastered the art of flight, even the eagles and hawks are still small and lost in this world of air, but they use it as their pathway to other lands and places.

We sit atop Blueberry Hill in Granville in the middle of September and wait for a glimpse of these creatures as they follow a path to a second home in the tropics. The sun warms the earth quickly and the earth warms the air close to it. The warmed air rises into the space above it and the cold air falls on all sides of this temporary rising column.

This is a called a thermal, and the hawks use it to find a higher place in the sky without beating those wings and burning their precious fat supply. Each hawk launches from the trees where it spent the night when the thermals died the previous afternoon, then looks for the morning lift.

For the common broad-winged hawk of the Northeast, this means sky-pooling, for they need each other’s help to find the thermals and use them to reach a tropical clime. We see these broadwings just above the horizon, first one or two, then a dozen, all circling around each other with set wings in the warm column.

After an hour, the thermals grow stronger and the hawks rise higher, now overhead and joined together in larger groups. At several hundred feet, they disappear from the naked eye even as they fly overhead, so we scan with our ten-power glasses and suddenly they reappear from nowhere.

Now there are thirty, fifty, a hundred, and sometimes several hundred, all soaring around in a cylinder of invisible air, as if caught in a boiling kettle. When they reach the top where the air finally cools and stops its rise, they spill out in lines over the kettle's rim, all heading in one direction. The image is so clear, we call these groups of circling hawks, kettles.

We count them as they glide silently overhead, small specks in a stream, all aimed at the Texas coast of the Gulf of Mexico. When they are gone and the sky is empty again, we note the numbers on our sheets and wait for the next appearance of this vision.

On a clear day when the birds can find thermals, there may be only a few minutes before the next kettle, and by the end of the day perhaps several thousand hawks will have passed over. We don't know for sure what day or hour they may come, so we watch and wait, staring into that all too often empty world of air. Often their path is to our east or west, drifted by strong winds, and we only see a mere handful.

Many or a few is what we see, but how do we feel? We feel awed by a gift seldom granted, a vision of small struggling life in a huge universe. The world is so great, and despite their numbers these birds seem few and fragile indeed, but they always come, and our spirits rise with them into the blue.

This was not a New England mountaintop, but the sky was nearly as big. To each side of the wide river tall trees loomed along the banks, intruding on the horizon, and hiding the distant hills. To the north and up the river the tops of several buildings poked their foreign noses barely above the trees. It was the tiny skyline of Springfield.

To the south was a truly alien landscape, a city of skeletons rising silently in the distance, perhaps a graveyard of spaceships left behind by visitors to our sleepy planet. It was actually an 'amusement' park, where thousands of human bodies suffered agonies of torture, standing hours in long lines until allowed to undergo an instant of thrilling pain.

The river and the brisk wind were giving my body a bit of a natural thrill as I waded through the water, thigh deep and straining against the waves. It was in fact quite exhilarating, and the goal was just ahead, an island in the middle of the Connecticut River.

The night before three of us had stood on the shore and trained our telescopes on the sandy parts of the island, hoping in vain to see a northern wheatear. This is a thrush-like landbird that raises its young on the very northern edge of this continent, but then uniquely migrates to the tropical parts of two other continents, Asia and Africa.

One of these birds had missed its aim and traveled from Alaska or Greenland to this island sandbar, and someone searching for more common migrants had found it. The river level had been high all summer, so when it had finally dropped a bit and exposed some muddy sand, this island was a place to find such visitors on their way south from the Arctic.

I decided to make another try the next morning, but was not hopeful as I waded into shallower water and approached the island. The older, main part of the island was just downriver, covered with tall trees. Upriver a bare sandspit stretched away, dotted with lounging gulls.

The bird had been seen in this middle section of the island, walking between the thickets of willow trees that had taken root in the drier sand and grown to human height. There was only a single tame least sandpiper, staying practically underfoot.

The sandpiper was a bird that had a more normal migration route, nesting on the Arctic tundra, but traveling in huge numbers to warmer winter shores in America. Often, we see 20 or 30 of these little beach birds on this island flat. This one didn't want to fly, but scurried into the willows and out again at the water's edge.

When the wheatear visits us, it comes alone, and only 40 or so have ever been reported before anywhere in Massachusetts, all but two right on the shoreline beaches. This bird was the third one here in western Massachusetts, and all of these have been found in mostly open habitat near water.

The wheatear has a gray back with dark wings and face mask. It is dull white underneath, but its rump and tail are distinctive. In fact, its name is thought to derive from the bright white rump and upper tail. The 'wheat' is a form of the word "white' and the 'ear' is a very old slang term for a person's butt.

Later that afternoon, some friends also walked out to the island and found an even rarer open country bird called a Sprague's pipit. It was another testament to the attraction of this special place in the river between Agawam and Longmeadow. I found neither bird, but walking back to shore through the warm, clear river water I was still cheered by the exotic aura of this miniature wilderness.

A spirit whispered in my ear, telling me to look up, and there was a peregrine falcon, circling over the river bank, leisurely searching for a meal. I stopped and drank it all in, the sky, the river, the breeze, and the falcon, more thrilled by these and the whispering spirit than by any gut-wrenching ride in a mechanical monster.

‍

The end of summer brings an air of urgency to all creatures, wild or human. There are so many things to do and the time for doing them is now short. We expect the weather to turn on us like the winds from the far north, and eventually it does.

Those winds are now delayed as we enjoy mild air from the south. This pattern of warmer, calmer autumns has been going on for the last 10-15 years, perhaps lulling us into a less frenetic fall. Even the migration of birds seems slower as the seeds ripen and the last insect hatches occur under balmy skies.

It is a bountiful time and the birds cannot be blamed for taking their leisure as they store fat before the long trip to the tropics. Even those that do not migrate are both well fed and restless at the same time. The chickadees and titmice may not migrate far, but they do disperse and move around, settling into new areas.

Perhaps this explains the constant calls coming to me lately, asking, "Where are all the birds? They have disappeared from the yard and feeders." When reminded it is migration time, they protest that their birds do not migrate. Perhaps some do not, but even the sedentary species move around more than we think.

Many of the hardier birds that eat seeds begin to flock and migrate in October. The blackbirds are already filling the evening skies in flocks of hundreds or thousands. Blue jays are joining together too, although their big movement also seems to be delayed.

These birds move quietly or very short distances, but they all have plenty to eat now at harvest time. Keep those feeders stocked and wait patiently for their return. There may not be as many as usual if the cold, wet summer reduced their breeding success, but fewer or not, they will be looking for food when the wild harvest finally dwindles.

Keep offering hummingbird nectar in case a rare or lingering hummingbird shows up. It appears that the long saga of Rufie the rufous hummingbird is finally at an end. She was let go from her winter greenhouse shelter in early May, but the Agawam yard where she has reappeared in late summer is still empty and cheerless this year.

It is time to hang out the suet again, for the woodpeckers seem to be calling in the yard more often, looking for fresh white suet, not the fat turned black and soft from the heat of summer. Some thistle feeders have attracted goldfinches all summer and continue to do so, but others have been deserted by this notorious wanderer. Keep the feeders hanging and hope a few finches will wander to your yard.

Any hanging or post feeder should have only thistle or sunflower in it, the mixed seed reserved for spreading thinly on the ground and replacing when it is gone. If you have only hordes of house sparrows, you may want to forego feeding any mixed seed at all.

If you get really desperate for your absent birds, why not take a walk and bring those binoculars? Except for your feeders, the average suburban yard is a desolate sterile wasteland with bushes and grasses cut and cropped before their seeding time.

Find a place where the weeds grow and come to seed, or the trees and bushes are allowed to become ragged and bear fruit. There is the harvest both bugs and birds have found, disdaining the sad and ugly lawns that provide nothing for them.

Even the public parks are usually over groomed to fit the modern taste for neatness. Only the last of the tropical migrants flitting in the treetops will be found there. If it is a city park or cemetery, the birds are there because the trees are the only place to find any food at all in the urban landscape.

The best places are the overgrown fields or meadows, the hedgerows, waste lots or community gardens gone to seed, the woodlots left to fend for themselves, or the power lines undrenched with herbicide. Find the rich harvest of fall, and there your birds will be.

Maybe you thought migration was easy for a bird. Just spread those wings one evening when the stars are shining bright and rise above the trees circling into the heights until you find your bearings. Your bird brain can sense both a magnetic map and a star map, so suddenly you sense the south and dive downwind on breezes from the north.

After days of feasting on fat and plentiful worms, all small birds have extra energy loaded in their cells, ready to burn as wings beat all night on the long journey. From Ontario they come or Quebec, over New York and New England, where others have left a few hours before on the flight line.

After a cold front passes off the coast, the winds are usually northwest, and the birds are driven toward the unwelcoming sea. The map above their heads is clear in their brains, but below all is dark except for the confusing lights of cities and towers. If fog forms, then the lights are their only beacon, and they come down to crash into tall buildings and towers to end both flight and life.

If the sky stays clear, then the flight lasts until the first glimmer on the eastern horizon, and the birds descend into the open arms of trees and shrubs. But depending on the departure point and the strength of the winds, the only thing the birds may find below may be the watery grave of Delaware Bay or the Atlantic Ocean.

Then begins a frantic dash, somewhere, anywhere, searching for the shore before the strength is gone from wings and heart. That is when those islands and peninsulas of hope, the blessed land jutting out from and into the sea, become safe havens. Monhegan, Cape Cod, Nantucket, Block and Long Island, all drawing the lost birds to them like sirens in the endless sea.

These are called migrant traps, where many birds end up, crammed together by the hundreds and thousands, all vying for the resting places and the dwindling food supply. These places are life savers, but they are also traps that must be left quickly to find the wider lands of the interior, where food is everywhere, and the frightening water is far behind.

The biggest trap of all on the east coast is in southern New Jersey, at a place called Cape May. There a narrowing strip of land extends far south to enclose the huge expanse of Delaware Bay, and the lost birds flee to it in the gray dawn. They land in the trees just beyond the beach, and there in a place called Higbee, we wait for them.

Among the dozens of birders lining the hedges and tree lines are nearly twenty members of the Allen Bird Club and Hoffman Bird Club, migrants from western Massachusetts come to this mecca of birdwatching. It is barely light, but birds are suddenly moving from tree to tree across the fields and roads, always working their way north toward broader lands.

The wind is strong against them, but their movement is inexorable, and we see them as they hesitate on open branches before launching out to the next tree of safety. it is early October, so these are the hardier, late leaving migrants like flickers and sapsuckers, yellow-rumped and palm warblers, and kinglets.

The tiny kinglets are wearing their bright fresh colors after the summer molt, the greens and yellows blending into grays, all topped by the bright head patch of either the ruby-crowned or the golden-crowned. They do not seem tired, rather restless and energized after their long trip and chancy landing.

On the edge of a woodlot in a single tree there are twenty or more ruby-crowned kinglets flipping their wings and jumping from branch to branch. Do they chance the long dash across an open area and over a pond with hungry hawks lurking overhead?

Suddenly they are gone, melted into the shadows, waiting for the sun to warm the leaves and arouse the insects. Then they will catch a quick snack before they venture across the open and continue the day long trip back inland away from the dreaded water. Yes, migration is an easy thing, just a waltz from park to park.

If migrating songbirds manage to avoid a watery grave when they overshoot the coastline, they still have to find their way back inland to richer sources of food. On the other hand, the bird-eating hawks already have the richest supply of food they will ever find. The hawks may not like the water either, but those lost, desperate songbirds sure make an easier and still tasty meal.

Hawks migrate during the daylight hours, so early morning at a migrant trap like Cape May, New Jersey brings songbirds and hawks out together, both heading north along the western or bay shore of this southward jutting peninsula.

If the wind is steady and strong from the northwest for two or three days, many hawks are kept close to the New Jersey coast as they move south. When they reach the point, they are faced with a long crossing over Delaware Bay, which some are reluctant to attempt.

They are happier with the steady lift of warmer air rising right along the shoreline where it meets the cooler ocean air. At the point stands a lighthouse and a huge wooden platform, where the hawk watchers stand to see this spectacle of hundreds of hawks flying just above their heads.

Just two miles north our group of bird watchers could not help but also see them as we walked the fields of the Higbee Beach Preserve. On this October morning, a steady stream of flickers and sapsuckers was also pushing north. They flew quickly on strong beating wings, occasionally stopping in a treetop for a short rest.

The hawks here were detouring from their southward route, hoping for a shorter crossing up the bay. They rode into the buffeting head wind, gliding and flapping slowly but relentlessly north. They were mostly sharp-shinned hawks and Cooper's Hawks, shaped and plumaged almost exactly alike but different in size.

The larger Cooper's hawks were very willing to make a meal of a vulnerable woodpecker, so occasionally we would see one dive upon a flicker, trying to grasp it before it made the safety of a tree. If it came close and the flicker had to take evasive or defensive action, we heard a hoarse, screaming call none of us had never heard before.

The attacks usually failed, because most of these hawks were immature birds, still tentative and clumsy in their attempts at capturing prey. Young birds hatched this year find themselves in migrant traps more often than older, experienced birds.

Later in the morning we joined others at the hawkwatch platform and kept our eyes to the skies, viewing the hawks as they approached the point. The ospreys, bald eagles and harriers would set a steady course across the mouth of the bay, heading for landfall at Cape Henlopen, Delaware.

The small broad-winged hawks would hesitate, circling slowly in the last thermal lift, drifting inexorably toward the Atlantic Ocean, then gliding away from it and repeating the circling process until they were high enough in the sky to risk the long glide to Delaware.

Many of the sharp-shinned hawks would also get as high as possible before they took off, but many would turn and head north. Not far away was a banding station, where the first-year birds would be tempted by starlings tethered to one more trap the hawks have to endure.

They are caught in nets when they dive or pounce on the prey until workers free them to be weighed, measured, banded and released. They have banded 100,000 hawks over the last twenty years and only 1,500 have ever been found again. A meager return for sure, but the only way to track individual birds and learn more about how and where they migrate.

Instead of banding, some are now radio-tagged and tracked by satellite. Three Pennsylvania broad-winged hawks were tagged early in September this year. Two weeks later, two of them were in east Texas, and just a few days ago they were in Nicaragua, safe in a tropical home.

The third bird did not even start the trip and likely has succumbed to starvation. Migration may be long and harrowing, but it is the only course of survival for many birds of the air.

It took a bit longer into the season than usual, but the feeders are now attracting more and more birds. After the local breeding sparrows left for farther south, it seemed a while before the new contingent of northern breeders arrived.

Suddenly the white-throated sparrows are scrounging among the fallen leaves. The first-year birds are still in their dull dress, the throat and crown-stripes an obscure gray, with streaking on breast and sides. Adults have bright white throats and crown stripes with no streaking.

Every song sparrow seems to be already in next year's breeding condition, bold dark streaks everywhere on their chests and faces. There are always a few in the yard, but now many are taking turns in the feeding area. Each day you must spread a fresh cup or two of mixed seed on the ground, or preferably just the white millet alone.

The chickadees and titmice are enjoying the wild harvest with only an occasional, brief stop at the hanging feeders where the sunflower awaits. Perhaps when the wild seed supply dwindles and the last insects disappear, then a pair of special birds will leave the nearby brush and show themselves.

This special bird is a Carolina wren that has been in the neighborhood for over a month now, and the male sings with fervor every day. This wren is a species that does not migrate, but in the fall young birds do have to leave the home territory, since the parents will not tolerate their presence.

Over the years one has stopped by and spent a day or two exploring the valley, but this time he seems here to stay, singing in several spots where the underbrush is thick. This may be because he has a companion, for a second bird sometimes answers the first from across the meadow.

It is likely a female, for a pair of these wrens often sing in duet. A single bird keeps moving until a mate is found, and then they settle down together in a permanent pair bond. If they make it through the first winter, they will build a nest and raise a brood in a tree cavity or brush pile, or even a garage or barn.

Carolina wren pairs often resort to feeders, eating seed as well as suet, because they cannot survive a harsh northern winter with heavy snow cover. They find their food mostly on the ground, and they need to find enough to stoke those mini furnace bodies. They are abundant anywhere south of New England, and with milder winters here are slowing expanding their range northward.

While the wrens keep to the woods, the native sparrows slowly and cautiously invade the feeding spaces, unless the dominant doves or house sparrows crowd them out. The juncos and tree sparrows have not arrived yet, but they will soon, along with an occasional rarer species.

There seems to be more western species this year than is usual among these regular migrant sparrows. For instance, many clay-colored sparrows have wandered to New England from the northern Great Plains. This sparrow's winter plumage is very similar to the chipping sparrow that is common here until the cold comes, but which then moves well south to the Gulf Coast.

Chipping sparrows like areas with short grass, and there was a flock the other day at the local cemetery. They quietly fed within a few feet of the car, their streaked brown backs blending into the sparsely grassed grounds. Crabgrass seeds are their favorite food, so I encourage this evil weed in my yard.

Speaking about delayed migration, the valley's star hummingbird stayed away so long that you heard her demise pronounced in these pages too soon. After coming back to Agawam in August for at least two years in a row, Rufie, the rufous hummingbird, waited until now to show up for her fifth winter with us.

When and where the birds move is less predictable than we like to think, so don't panic if they disappear for a while. Keep your yard overgrown and untidy with feeders well stocked. The birds will return.

We had almost passed by the Chatham Lighthouse since the parking places there were nearly full. The weather was bright and sunny, so plenty of October vacationers were at this scenic spot. We were members of the Allen Bird Club searching for migrating birds on our annual Cape Cod Weekend.

A few years ago, a mighty winter storm had broken through the barrier beach in front of the bluff where the lighthouse stands. Now this spot stood exposed to the open sea, the surf squeezing through a broad inlet and roiling the entrance to Pleasant Bay to the north, still protected by the old dunes of Nauset Beach. In the opposite direction stretched the newer dunes of the still-growing South Beach.

We had just finished a grueling trek out to the tip of South Beach, where we were alone with the wind, the waves, and the birds. The boaters and beachgoers of summer were not there, and even the clam diggers decided not to venture out on a blustery day.

The ferryman was surprised at our intentions, but he brought us out to the drop-off point and we trudged slowly into the wind the last three miles to where the shorebirds fed, the last few thousand of a long migration season. They paid the band of humans little heed as they raced time and the fallen tide to find enough food to further their long trip south.

We saw hundreds of plovers and sanderlings and dunlin, the hardy members of this mud- and sand-loving tribe of water birds. There was a smattering of others like the oystercatchers, red knots, willets, and also the king of the shorebirds, the marbled godwit.

Six of these tall, stately, cinnamon-colored shorebirds brandished their 18" long bills like deadly swords, probing deep in the mud. The marbled godwit nests on the Northern Prairies and most winter on the West and Gulf Coasts, with only a few stopping here in the fall.

After a while, we left the calmer flats on the bay side and crossed the dry dunes to the ocean side. There the gulls swooped and glided while the huge seals lifted their gleaming gray heads from the surf and stared at us with wide wondering black eyes. The terns we expected to find were not in sight. We trudged to the pick-up point and rode the ferry back to the crowds and traffic.

We forgot our fatigue as we emerged from our cars at the lighthouse, for there were the missing terns, hundreds of them flying before and below us, diving into the waters to catch the small fish that were concentrated in this one spot. These birds had a long flight to Central America ahead of them, and they were already late in setting out, but the good fishing and mild weather kept them here still.

However, they had to watch out for pirates, and so did we. In a few seconds, we found them, more active and agile than the terns, making quick short dives and climbs with sharp U-turns on longer, powerful wings. In Britain they call these birds skuas, but for some reason here, we use the word jaeger, the German word for hunter.

Either word conveys the sense of unsavory supremacy that are ascribed to these seldom seen species. To us, the piracy they practice by forcing other birds to relinquish their 'hard earned' catch is at least suspect. In the animal world, piracy is simply another way to survive in a world where getting it done is the only virtue.

The power and beauty of these birds enraptured us, for this was a show none of us had ever seen, and few ever see. Usually jaegers are far off-shore, and we get glimpses of them from a tossing deck as they race by the boat. Here, we were wowed by their mastery of the air, for they did what seemed impossible; made the terns and gulls seem slow and stodgy.

We chorused our approval as two or three jaegers sped back and forth in the hunt before us. The casual tourists kept their distance or approached cautiously to ask what was so special about a bunch of seagulls. You can miss much if you do not look closely at the wild world around you.

This is the time of year when birds can surprise you just by their sheer numbers. For many species, it is time to flock together and appear to be friends. Around here, we are most likely to see large groups of starlings, crows, or Canada geese, but there are other species as well.

These flocks can be quite secretive and even mysterious. Take a walk in a field overgrown with bushes and grasses and stop by a brush pile hidden by tall weeds. All might be silent with not a feather stirring. Make a hissing noise, however, and from the depths of the brush, where they had been feeding quietly on fallen seeds, the little juncos rise like gray ghosts.

They sit in the open at the top of the pile and twitch their tails nervously, showing off the white outer tail feathers. The gentle tinkle of their tiny voices fills the air, building to a chorus as the flock grows to forty or fifty birds, all coming closer to find the source of the noise.

Once this fall, there was a louder clack note that caught my ear among the junco voices. A larger bird, which first appeared to be a mockingbird, was in a small tree among the juncos. It turned out to be a shrike, a predator of the small juncos, but they ignored their enemy as they slowly flew off and melted away again into the dense groves.

There have also been flocks of blackbirds around, these birds more obvious, ranging across the skies, especially in the late afternoon or early morning. They will appear suddenly overhead, heralded by their noisy chucking, which can be heard a mile away if there are enough birds.

Often, the first hundred or two suddenly becomes a stream that stretches into the high horizon. They pop into view in growing numbers as the lead birds are already disappearing in the opposite distance. The hill in Granville, where watchers are still counting migrating hawks during the day, has been in the flight line of a huge congregation of grackles.

One late afternoon, the watcher estimated a broad line of grackles flying toward the southeast numbering about 125,000 birds. The day before this, and a few miles away in Southwick, another startled yard raker looked up and witnessed a similar flight that she said seemed like 'millions.'

These grackles are staging for a massive flight farther south, where flocks and roosts of several million have been known to form, descending on the snowless countryside by day and gathering in a dense grove of tall evergreens by night. If this happens near human habitations, the alarm of nearby residents leads to measures aimed at disturbing or moving the roost.

Gathered together as they are, these birds do not do it for friendship. In fact, it is a syndrome known as the 'geometry of the selfish herd.' Each bird benefits from the flocking by reducing its exposure in the 'domain of danger,' where a predator might pick off a single bird at the edge of the flock.

In a roost, the experienced and healthy birds take the center of the flock, leaving others on the outer edge. In turn the younger birds benefit by having the veterans lead them to good foraging grounds during the day. As the young birds survive each year, they gradually move in to the center for a safer night's sleep.

Such flocks can be disruptive to both man and nature. In Africa, a bird called the red-billed quelea will swarm in the many millions, and flamethrowers have been used to control them when the crops of an entire region have been threatened. The quelea is a weaver finch, a close relative of the house sparrow, which is trouble enough at our feeders in their flocks of fifty or more.

The largest flocks on record belong to North America, where masses of passenger pigeons once darkened the sky as they flew. As many as several billion birds would descend on a single place in a nesting colony which would encompass square miles of soon-devastated countryside. The birds would move on and nature survived, as the pigeon did until man's assault with firearms. Flocking together did not protect this bird from the ultimate predator.

Even the most casual of yard watchers likes to see new things through their windows. The thrill of a unique, first-time sight of a fox sparrow or red-bellied woodpecker is not to be dismissed lightly. We probably are recreating the wonder and joy of childhood, when the world itself is a new thing, and every moment was filled with a sense of discovery.

Each new experience is a springboard to yet another as we build up a body of memories and knowledge that will keep us eager to rise in the morning. It helps to write down what we have seen and heard, to organize these memories in lists and journals. Such a record allows you to share and compare what you have experienced with others who do the same.

This seems to be the reason why many bird watchers become birders as well. We join a local club, or become members of a state and national organization. We subscribe to a magazine and read about birds and the work of others who study birds. We buy a field guide or a handbook about bird behavior, or a travel guide about where to find new birds in other places.

This is the way a casual recreation becomes a passion. Then we start projects and set goals, measuring what we have done or planning what we want to do. One project for almost all birders is the compiling of a year-list of bird species we have seen in our home state.

The breeding and migration season of our tropical birds is finished. We will not see these birds until next spring, when they will be new birds on a new list. Meanwhile, we may ponder with regret why this year we missed seeing some of them.

Many birders look forward to the day they retire, when they can concentrate more on studying or finding birds. Three friends of mine have recently retired, and they embarked on a friendly competition, to see who could find the most different species in Massachusetts in the year 2000.

You might be surprised to learn that there are almost 290 species on a checklist of birds you might expect to find in our state each year. However, nearly fifty of those are found only with special effort, visiting the right location at the right time and then being lucky as well. It is now November and the three lists stand at 315, 307, and 298 species.

You need help to find this many, which means being connected to the network of other birders, one of whom will find those special birds that only rarely wander into Massachusetts from other parts of the country. These birds will often be 'life birds,' an individual of a species that one has never seen anywhere before.

An example is a tropical kingbird, which was found over a week ago in a place called World's End in the town of Hingham on Massachusetts Bay southeast of Boston. The day after it was reported, at least fifty birders traveled to re-find it in the cold and mist on this beautiful peninsula of fields and woods preserved by the Trustees of Reservations.

That next day, close-up photos of this very individual bird were available on the internet, and soon even audio recordings of it calling. This was partly to help confirm the identity of this species, which is common in Central America, but almost never is found north of south Texas and Arizona. It is the first time a tropical kingbird was ever seen in Massachusetts.

I had seen this species before in Mexico and Arizona, but viewing it perched on the tops of wilting weeds in a cold New England meadow added an extra element of amazement. This small bundle of colorful tropical life had come so far on such delicate feathers.

The final touch on its feat-of-flight and its will to live, was how this wild and exotic bird fed itself on bugs and wasps hiding in the dying grass. The thrill for us was not just because it was a unique, once in a lifetime experience, but that we were witness to the perseverance of live itself.