The Kellogg Columns

Do you have to wait until third Spring to enjoy warblers? Most of the many different members of this family of small, colorful tree birds are tropical, and strictly consume the insects that feed on the leaves of trees. It is usually the last few days of April before the deciduous trees begin to leaf out and insects begin to feed on those baby leaves.

There are a hardy handful of warblers that have found a way to supplement such a diet. One of them is the pine warbler, which not only specializes in the trees that are ever green with leaves, but also is adept at finding food in other places. So the pine warbler does not migrate to Central or South America for the winter, it stops well-short.

It can be found all year in the great yellow pine forests of the southeastern United States. The birds that nest to the north of the Mason-Dixon line retreat only a few hundred miles to join their southern relatives in late fall, and are poised to return to us early in spring.

They are here now, and if you visit a pine forest, such as those found in parks or around reservoirs, you can find them. There the bright yellow breast of the male appears to hang on the green boughs like a forgotten Christmas ornament. They move rather slowly for a warbler and are easy to see as they forage along the branches.

The voice is simple, a single mellow note repeated in a long series that is often called a trill but is not. This song is easy to confuse with other species that have very similar voices. The notes in the chipping sparrow song are drier and crisper, the junco notes are slight and more liquid. The pine warbler paces his notes and holds them just long enough for a sweet, gentle, and soothing sound.

Instead of joining the throngs of shoppers that visit the mall in Holyoke, turn the other way and drive up the hill to Ashley Ponds. Walk inside the gate and enter the dark woods to your left. There you will discover the pine warbler as soon as the first of April, perhaps many of them, just arrived in the small flocks that is their travel mode.

The ponds are nestled among the trees, and near the shallow edges where insects are first active you will also find a companion warbler called the palm. This bird looks similar, but the yellow of its belly spreads all the way back under the tail, while the pine is white there. The palm warbler forages on or near the ground almost all the time, while the pine only sometimes dines there.

Another second spring warbler partial to evergreens is the yellow-rumped, formerly called the myrtle warbler. As the old, preferable name suggests, this bird eats small berries during the cold months and is found regularly in the thickets that grow near the ocean in winter, even in southern New England. The pine warbler also considers berries an acceptable menu item.

On a cold day in early spring, you might see several pine warblers checking the leaf litter for bugs, or even eating pine seeds. In fact, these birds are so hardy and resourceful, they sometimes survive the New England winter. Every few years there is a call from a surprised home owner, reporting that a pine warbler is coming in to grab bits of seed or suet at their feeder.

The pine warbler prefers the yellow or pitch pine once common on the flat sand barrens of the Connecticut River Valley. Such places are ideal for building houses, however, most of those forests are much thinned now, or even removed entirely. Fortunately, the bird will resort to white pines if the yellow is not available.

The pine warbler is one of those southern species that is extending its range northward, increasing here over the last fifty years, and now present wherever pines grow. The palm and yellow-rumped warblers breed mostly north of us, but all three species stay all year in North America, thanks to their ability to find food in many places.

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After a warm and sunny start to this month, April showers have become relentless. The migrants that arrive early in Spring are scratching for food, especially the swallows. Every day a visit to any pond or lake will feature hundreds of them patrolling the waters, as patient and persistent as the fishermen in their boats who sometimes share the scene.

These little birds of the air buzz around the boats continuously, swooping low to the surface, then rising up to perform a sudden twist or even a sideward somersault. Their wings beat silently and endlessly, carrying the birds around and around like blind marathon runners, forever failing to reach the finish line.

Is this the mass suicide that happens to lemmings, plunging headlong ahead until they fall exhausted into the sea? When does the energy in these mighty mites run out, or do they possess some secret source to replenish their tank on the fly? It is no secret, because here above the waters is the only flying fuel there is on a cold, rainy April day.

Myriads of small, nearly invisible insects hatch from the surface and swarm around, searching for food themselves, but are instead fodder for the swallows. The acrobatics the birds perform are only the little maneuvers they must do to catch the unseen bugs in their wide-open bills. It is airborne dining at its best.

Most of these birds are tree swallows, and their white bellies shine even in the gray gloom as they bank and swerve not far off shore. Their iridescent backs flash steely blue with each turn, not the deep sky blue of a bluebird, with which the tree swallow is sometimes confused.

There are five species of swallows that breed across the entire content, from ocean to ocean. Four are named after their nesting preference, tree, bank, barn, and cliff (the swallows of San Juan Capistrano). The fifth is the rough-winged, which could have easily been given the name bridge swallow.

Sometimes these masterful fliers do land, but rarely on trees. Usually, they line up on electric wires that happen to be near a good feeding ground. Often, they fill three or four wires from pole to pole, sitting shoulder to shoulder, with just enough room to preen their feathers into place, ready for the next take-off.

A few days ago there was a flock of fifty tree swallows in a tight swarm just off-shore. They came in toward me and began to land in the branches of a maple tree that reached out over the water. Tree swallows alighting in a tree, it was a rare sight indeed. With them was one swallow with a longer tail and a chestnut-colored throat, a barn swallow.

As they settled down, side by side they chattered to each other with liquid musical notes that seemed like friendly and gentle banter. They seemed as cheery as when, on a warm sunny day, they circle over a beaver pond where there are nesting holes in the rotting snags, or a field where there are nesting boxes.

Six or eight birds will visit each home site in turn, two landing and the rest circling and twittering excitedly. Each couple gets plenty of help shopping for their single-family home, which in the end are probably assigned according to rank and seniority. But with such cold wet weather, it is not very long before they all retreat to the communal kitchen of a larger, gnat infested pond.

The swallows have a cousin, the purple martin, who favors the even closer habitation of an apartment building. Almost 100 years ago, in May of 1903, there was a prolonged cold wet spell of storms that killed all the martins who then lived in New England. There just was not enough food for them anywhere.

Since then, martins from the south have moved slowly north to a few places on the coast in Connecticut and Massachusetts. I always look for a stray martin with the flocks of swallows, and there was a report of two in Northampton during the height of the last rainstorm.

Let the sun shine soon and breed more gnats for swallows and martins alike. They have done nothing to deserve being thrown into the sea, hungry and tired.

The hawk most seen in New England has to be the red-tailed hawk. These hawks are present year-round, and they have adapted to human habitation well. In the cold months, a few of our breeding pairs stay and guard their territories, but they still have to share the countryside with birds from farther north. In early spring, the northerners leave and give our nesting birds a little feeding room, which they need to feed the growing chicks.

A neighbor called the other day to report on a disaster for a pair that was nesting in a large tree within view of his house. There was a commotion in the night, and the next morning, egg shells were on the ground and the nest was a wreck. Raccoons probably were the raiders, but there are many mammals, as well as some birds, that eat eggs.

In winter, there is a red-tail hawk in even the smallest snow covered field or bare patch of grass where a rodent or rabbit may try to hide. There they sit in the open along the commuter highways in their brown suit with a black belt and red tail. It sounds like formal apparel, but the spiffy outfit more befits casual Friday.

The red-tailed hawk has increased since shooting them was banned, but at nesting time, it is still far outnumbered by another hawk in New England. This is a similar but smaller raptor called the broad-winged hawk. It is a woodland hawk, that stays well under cover of the canopy and rarely ventures out to be seen.

The broad-wing sits quietly on a lower branch of a tree and waits for the forest mice and chipmunks to appear beneath. Then it glides silently down to pounce and capture a precious meal. These birds build a nest in the fork of a tree, usually a yellow birch, and keep the number of rodents around the nest down to a healthy level.

We have had a plague of chipmunks the last few years, and one reason may be that there are fewer broad-winged hawks around, despite the continued growth of our wooded areas. They used to take their young high overhead every August in my neighborhood, circling and whistling their clear, long descending notes. The last few years, they have disappeared.

The new birds need plenty of flight time before the long autumn journey to Central and South America. The broad-winged hawk is a long-distance commuter, traveling thousands of miles to find a winter place in the dwindling forests of the tropics.

We have been looking for their return all during April, but the storms and clouds throughout the East have kept them from reaching us on time. A few arrived in mid-month with a window of sun and south winds, but the next clearing was April 24 with strong northwest winds.

The birds were coming low and close over the hill where we watch, just over a hundred of them in three hours. The next day there was a brisk northeast headwind, but it turned out to be perfect for them, as flocks of twenty or thirty hawks simply sailed slowly into the wind all day. By late afternoon we had counted over 700 broad-winged hawks.

An Allen Bird Club trip to the mountain two days later was a repeat of the first flight day with northwest winds and close looks at hawks slowed by the buffeting cross wind. On the way to the watch site, we passed an old orchard on a hilltop, and there was a single broad-winged hawk perched openly in an apple tree.

Some field guides show the back as brown, but most of them look like this bird, garbed in a svelte dark gray suit with a white shirt front sporting rusty red bars. No traveling salesman could have been more handsome or better dressed than this traveling bird.

We admired him briefly from inside the cars, but he quietly withdrew to hide in the bright shade of the still unleafed forest. That hawk was decked out for the serious work of spring courting and breeding. It was not a show for us, for such shy beauty is reserved for impressing a potential mate.

After delaying for so long, the migration has now come with a mighty rush. The clouds broke on April 28 and three days of strong northerly winds followed before clear skies and south winds finally took over. As so often happens, the first day of May brought tropical air and tropical birds to our backyards.

There were warblers in the treetops, and among the newly arrived species found that day in my neighborhood was the yellow warbler. When this warbler sings it is finally true spring, and one was in a favorite wild spot, singing above a brushy wet meadow along a small willow-lined brook.

When you walk into the New England woods on the first day of true Spring, you should also expect to hear the voice of the ovenbird. It is the most common woodland song of all, loud and clear and seemingly belted out by a creature that is everywhere at once and nowhere to be found. Usually, its song is rendered into words as 'teacher, teacher, teacher.' This day the song eluded me, but the ovenbird offered something much rarer.

Often tropical migrants are silent when they first arrive here on their breeding territory. They have flown at night from Central America through Mexico and Texas or even over the Gulf of Mexico. Each day they feed and replenish their energy. The next night that the wind is calm, they launch off again in the dark and fly another few hundred miles.

It is a taxing journey that some do not survive, but if they do, they sometimes take a little time to recover their full senses and their appetite for the courtship song. No ovenbird sang for me, but at one place I stopped and noticed slight movement on the leafy forest floor. What usually stays hidden, suddenly appeared.

The ovenbird was walking gingerly across the dry brown leaves, placing each step carefully and peering down intently. Not only did the secret singer show himself, but how many times have you seen a land bird walk? Very few do at all, but rather hop or jump with a flit and a flutter. This bird looked comically human as it strode slowly but purposefully forward.

It reminded me of another rare scene only two days before, when twenty members of the Allen Bird Club were lined along an old stone dam in the hills. The small brook splashed noisily through the rocks below the dam, but above, the water was slow and sluggish with muddy edges.

We had been listening to the Louisiana waterthrush sing loudly below the dam, but as so often happens, it would not sit still on the branch or the rocks long enough for a good view. Finally, it flew over the dam right past us and landed on the edge of the pool. It was lined with leaves, which the waterthrush proceeded to lift and turn over one at a time as it walked the edges.

The waterthrush is another one of those few walking warblers, and is quite similar to the ovenbird in appearance. Both have white underparts heavily streaked with black, and dark brown backs. The ovenbird has a pale eye ring, while the waterthrush has a bold eye stripe, but both share the same leaning posture as they walk along the ground or a low branch.

You will only find the waterthrush near a running brook, for it specializes in eating the insects found there. It has the habit of bouncing its rump and tail up and down with agitated force, bending its knees to do so. The ovenbird is more sedate, as befits the quiet of the drier forest floor.

After a long trip from Mexico, these birds can be excused for not being eager to fly back into the endless air. Now they can walk to their heart's content, remaining on a small patch of forest floor or along a stretch of stream for several months, until a new generation is hatched and raised.

Odd, that with all the frenzy of hundreds of these tropical birds filling the treetops and bushes with song, color, and motion, what thrilled me the most were two small brown birds walking gently among the fallen leaves.

If you live in a neighborhood of many homes, there will be a limited variety of birds to hear and see. To experience the full pleasure of birds in Spring, you have to find a place to walk on the wild side.

This may be a path through an undeveloped patch of brush and woods just down the street, or it may be a park with trails and tall trees. An older cemetery or a park within a city that has plenty of tall trees with areas of brush and undergrowth is an excellent place because it 'traps' migrants who descend from the sky in early morning and find mostly sterile concrete.

The Stebbins Wildlife Refuge in Longmeadow, owned and managed by the Allen Bird Club, is one of these wild places. About twenty people took three walks through parts of the refuge on the last three Wednesdays, and they learned quite a bit about the process of migration.

On May 3 the leaves were barely out after a cold, wet spell, but for the previous two days it had begun to warm under the influence of south winds. The first sign of migration were the dozens of yellow-rumped warblers that were feeding and calling in the lower branches of the trees. There were five or ten in one tree and with them were a few ruby-crowned kinglets. Along the way a few catbirds mewed in the thick bushes, while some wood thrushes caroled unseen in the meager shade of the trees.

A handful of blue-gray gnatcatchers were down the trail a bit, also flitting about in the open. Higher up and very vocal were the warbling vireos that nest here. There were also a couple of blue-headed vireos which do not. The most prominent nesting warbler in this wet, lowland area was the yellow warbler, and ten or fifteen of them sang and chased one another about the trees and shrubs.

Often, we only hear a bird singing and are unable to find it hidden in the treetops. Such was true of single blue-winged, parula, black-throated blue, and black-throated green warblers. There was also just one redstart and one ovenbird, but three of the black & white warblers.

There were two palm warblers and two northern waterthrush, both staying close to the ground. The waterthrush sang loudly from the swampy areas, but were not seen. The palm warbler was obvious, hanging around the trails and bobbing its tail. The final two tropical species were several rose-breasted grosbeaks and a pair of Baltimore orioles, larger than any of the others and plain to see and hear.

There were about 120 individual tropical migrants of 19 different species, almost half being the yellow-rumped warbler. Compare this to one week later on May 10, when the same two hour walk in the same area had about 170 such birds of 32 different species. A rare May heat wave had hit the Northeast and already we were well along on the migration calendar.

This time, three different types of flycatchers led the parade. Also added were two thrushes, red-eyed vireos, and nine warbler species. Most of these were represented by up to ten birds each. There were more than a dozen orioles cavorting through the leafed-out branches of many trees, but only four yellow-rumped warblers and no palm warblers, kinglets, or blue-headed vireos. These species had already moved through to their northern breeding grounds.

On May 17 the final walk had only 110 birds of 23 species, and the mix was changed again. New were two plain willow flycatchers, a brilliant indigo bunting, and two hummingbirds feeding in the honeysuckle. Seven warblers, one thrush, and two flycatchers from the previous week were not found, and only the nesters were common.

In May, you don't just get the sights and sounds of the bright and beautiful birds. You get a sense of their amazing passage from place to place, and you learn when each species is most likely to pass through. Perhaps there are still some birds to our south, waiting for another warm night and following breezes. Then there will be more to see when we walk on the wild side.

There is a uniquely New World family of birds called tyrant flycatchers that is found only in the Americas. There are many dozens of species in this family, but only about 35 in North America. This group is separated from the vast order of perching birds by lacking a developed larynx, making it generally a poor singer.

This does not mean that these birds do not have songs and calls. For a few, the voice is exquisitely sweet, even if short. They are a pugnacious bunch as their name implies, and they use their limited voice with abandon whenever they confront other birds or each other. The paradox is that many of these birds look very similar and their voice is often the only thing that sets them apart from other members of their family.

The tyrant flycatchers are the oldest of all the perching species, and they have a kingly demeanor befitting their ancient lineage. They sit erect and motionless on a branch, waiting for an insect to approach in the air, then sally out to seize it, returning to a perch to consume and wait for more.

Many of them are very small and inconspicuous, and when they return from their tropical haunts to our forests and thickets, we have to seek them out if we want to enjoy their antics. This is usually later in May, when the leaves are fully out and they can melt into the greenery unseen, but often heard.

There was a small flycatcher in a low bush on the edge of the woods on one of the many cloudy days recently. It sat in the open and appeared to be one of the empidonax flycatchers. This is a group of eleven different species in North America that exemplify the flycatcher family, because they all look much alike and are told apart more by their voice. The word 'empidonax' means 'king of the gnats.'

However, this bird lacked any eye ring and sported a somber dark coat rather than the light gray-green of the empidonax. It did not utter a sound, so we had to rely on these marks to determine that it was an eastern wood pewee, away from its normal haunts under the shaded canopy of the mature forest. This bird was tame, as over and over it jumped up to grasp a flying bug and settled back down in the top of a small sapling.

An hour later on a narrow trail through a dense thicket of half-grown trees, the note of another flycatcher was heard. It was a single note repeated, but distinctive enough to guess which of the flycatchers it might be. With patience, the bird appeared, an empidonax showing a belly suffused with muted yellow.

The yellow-bellied flycatcher breeds in the thick spruce forests of the north, passing quietly through southern New England in late May without fanfare. Usually we never see this species, but hear one of its several distinctive short calls, a sound in the woods, the maker never to be seen. It likes the thickest part of the undergrowth, and we viewed this bird only because we walked a trail through its habitat.

One of these calls is a plaintive slow whistle, "per-weee', rising at the end. For a bird with a stunted voicebox, it is a remarkable sound, worthy of royalty, pure in tone and gently soothing to the ear. The wood pewee we had seen earlier has a similar and even more amazing song from which it gets its name, 'peee-er-weee.'

Sometimes the pewee shortens its version to sound almost exactly like the yellow-bellied flycatcher song. It is one of the marks of the master birder to tell apart some of the slightly different calls of the flycatchers, but at least it can be done. The kingly robe of some of the empidonax group is so alike it is beyond the powers of even the keenest eye to tell them apart.

We are fortunate to have the wood pewee as a breeder in our own forests of southern New England. The next time you walk in the woods on an early morning, listen for this royal singer, the tiny tyrant of the woods. You will fall under its siren spell and may never return.

Usually we can remember the bird that first caught our eye or ear, opening us to the world of birds. There are probably seeds planted earlier that resonate in our hidden memories when that magic moment occurs, but the experience itself is etched in the mind forever.

It could be a cardinal singing in the yard, or an indigo bunting visiting the feeder. For me it was a real beauty, the Baltimore oriole. It was singing in an apple tree close by when I stepped out of the car one day. The song may have drawn my attention, but it was the color of the oriole that drove a bolt through my eyes into my mind's heart.

Until then it was only a drawing in a book, beautiful, but distant, lost in the ether of the unknown. Here it was close and sensual, full of the energies of living. For the first time in my life I knew that orioles were real, and I was enthralled.

It meant that every other bird in the book was out there somewhere, with the same electric charge of discovery. Since then, the charge has happened countless time, filling me with delight. Even the Baltimore oriole is rediscovered every year in the first few days of May.

It was named after the Baltimores, a family of English nobility whose colors were the same as the bird's. The scientists took away that name from the bird a few years ago, but wisely gave it back. The name is beautiful and appropriate to this oriole.

My yard is the home of a pair of orioles. You will find them wherever there are scattered tall trees. They love to hang their nest from the lowest drooping stems of a weeping willow branch, where it sways in the breeze like an endless lullaby. This cradle rarely falls, for the mother weaves the fibers of the nest to the stems with infinite care and precision.

Sometimes a gale whips a branch from the tree in fall or winter, but it is not likely during the gentle winds of June. The other day I saw a female oriole tugging mightily at some long mossy filaments high in a sycamore tree. They were entwined around a branch in a knot of growing plants, but she braced her spindly legs and ripped them from their unbreakable anchor.

Off she flew, trailing her prize to the chosen nest site. There she will wind the long strings around the tree stems and build a bigger knot that would be her basket bed. It only takes a few days, then she lays the three or four eggs in the bottom of this sling and sits in her rocking castle till the hatching.

She wears a different dress than her mate, dull by contrast, a dingy orange, dirty on the back and wings where the male is ebony. His black forms a hood, but the rest of the body is vibrant orange, broken by dark on the wings and tail. These are the colors of the Baltimores that won me over, put me on my knees as a devotee of birds.

Appreciation for the song came later. When the young are born in that pendulous nest, they soon begin to make an incessant whining sound, begging to be fed. I like to hear it, for it means new birds for the coming years. It ends too soon in the year and so does that father's serenade.

By the end of June, his whistles become rarer and his chatter ceases. There is such a contrast between the harsh rattle of the bird's call and the pure notes of the song, strung together in a random pattern, and varying from individual to individual. The great amount of variation in the songs of different male orioles is unique among our nesting birds.

The design of the nest is so successful that few young are lost to predation, so the pair only raises one brood. Summer means a quiet wandering through the trees out of sight, and I marvel at how hard they are to find then. But the next May they always return and shout their songs and colors to all who can hear. I am glad I looked that day and found the oriole.

We live on a watery planet, and we live because of those waters. The sea is the womb and cradle that once rocked every creature. But dry land emerges from the sea, and so did adventurous creatures who found more complex ways to live and breathe.

Eventually some of the adventurous returned to the sea, always bringing a bit of the dry land on which to float. Fishing boats that challenge the open ocean are now highly evolved, powerful white beasts that growl deeply, and spit both spray and fumes. They are extensions of our own blundering feet, our walk upon the water made possible with ingenuity and brute strength rather than miraculous faith.

I was with ten birders from New England on an expedition to North Carolina, trying to find birds we had never seen before, "life birds." Our fishing boat, the Country Girl, cut through the green waves along the Carolina shores, then headed out to sea. We searched for the most adventurous creatures of all, the birds that had returned to the great waters and had made them their home.

The cold ocean close to the eastern coasts of North America comes down in a current from the north. Farther off the coast is another vast current from the south, heated by the tropical sun and rushing even to the arctic, eventually warming a Europe that otherwise might be locked in ice.

It began as a cool morning, overcast with a moderate breeze, but after two hours in jackets and slickers, suddenly the air turned sultry. The waves were still rising and falling as before, but the color was now an amazing shade of deep blue, a liquid sparkling blue as unlike the color of sky as the water itself was unlike the air.

These were the warm gulf stream waters, holding different life forms, including the birds that flew here far from land. Soon we saw them, the shearwaters that sailed above the waves and spirited away the wealth of food that floated near the surface, the shrimp and crabs and fish among the sargasso weeds. There were dozens of Cory's shearwaters, some Audubon's shearwaters, and finally the petrels.

There were many small storm petrels, in fact three different kinds that bounced on the oil-soaked waters in our wake like little Saint Peters (petrel means little rock). It was the fish oil that we were spreading, hoping to attract the many ocean-going species collectively called tubenoses. They possess a powerful sense of smell to guide them to food on the trackless sea.

Most curious of all was a large dark jaeger called the pomerine, a hunter and thief who hung out just over the back of the boat, landing briefly on the water when we paused to enjoy the circling shearwaters. It was the only jaeger we saw, and we missed entirely the sought-after white-tailed tropicbird.

There are also four larger gadfly petrels that are found off the Carolina coast, the most common being the black-capped petrel, which nests on Hispaniola and Cuba. We saw a few dozen of these, but it was afternoon before the big adventure began.

An all-dark bird, perhaps a herald petrel, was seen in the distance and we doubled back. These rarely seen petrels nest on islands off the coast of Brazil, and a few spend the rest of the year in the gulf stream off our shores. Suddenly one did appear alongside, streaking in from the distance and heading swiftly away. The Captain hit the throttle and the boat hurtled after it with a roar.

It was like a ride at Riverside and we held on, but still managed to line up along the rail, even those that had been hanging over the back of the boat being sick. We bobbed and weaved with the petrel for ten minutes as it glided gracefully over the waves that sometimes seemed higher than the boat.

At thirty miles per hour, the bird rode the restless air without a wing beat. What an amazing gift of grace that tames the terrible void of the sea and turns it into a home. We too had tamed our own turbulent need to see and know what lies out there. Without such an urge to explore, life would still be imprisoned in a single cell beneath the sea.

No bird is more obvious than the dove. It is a larger bird that likes to sit out on a bare branch or wire and just sleep away the day. If a bird or two suddenly flies across the open sky, it will very often be the dove, and if you're looking for something special, you are left to console yourself with 'It's just a mourning dove.'

When a dove chanted out its slow hollow coo the other day, I was reminded that they had stopped calling. Males have been busy with the duties of helping to raise the first of many summertime broods. That mournful drone of drawn-out notes is not the same as the staccato coo of the rain crow, a sound that has been missing this spring.

With all the rain we have had, it would seem the rain crow, properly called the cuckoo, would be sitting hidden among the lush leaves cooing constantly. A black-billed cuckoo has been heard every year across the street from the house, and one June the rarer yellow-billed cuckoo sang as well.

It has not happened this spring, and one reason might be that the hairy caterpillars are scarce here this year. These delicacies are the favorite food of the shy cuckoo, and the bird makes his home where he finds them. If tent caterpillars and gypsy moths are in short supply, the cuckoo goes elsewhere to find them.

Even when such food is plentiful and the cuckoos are around, they are harder to see than doves. They rarely venture out into the open, preferring the recesses of the darkest thicket or deepest forest to the more exposed places. When they do fly above the canopy, falcons find the slow flying cuckoo an easy catch.

Cuckoos and doves are the same size and have the same warm brown back, but the cuckoo is white underneath with a longer tail, spotted below. The size and pattern of the spots is one of the ways you can distinguish between the black and yellow-billed cuckoos. The other is the bill color, which for either cuckoo is longer and more curved than the dove's dinky beak.

When the cuckoo makes an appearance, then you know it is a special time, as when the mechanical bird pops out of closed doors and announces each hour. The cuckoo in the clock is named after a European species, which is the same size with the same general form, but there the resemblance ends. The European cuckoo is otherwise known for its habit of laying eggs in another bird's nest, letting foster parents raise their young the same way our cowbird does.

Our cuckoos do not use this parasitic reproductive system. They build a nest as most species do, and raise their own young, often in old orchards where caterpillars like to dine. They arrive later in May, since they have a long way to come from South America, where they spend the colder months. They also tend to nest late, which may be another reason why few have been heard calling during a decidedly cold, delayed spring.

The black-billed cuckoo is more common in New England and its normal call is three fast, repeated coos with a short pause between each set. You will hear this call often if the bird is around and courting, but the cuckoo is furtive and shy, never popping out when he sings, but sitting quietly in the deep shade.

A special hour did arrive a week ago in North Carolina, when the yellow-billed cuckoo appeared to our admiring eyes. For several birders in our group it was a life bird, and it showed off by sitting on an open branch like a dove, its white throat pulsing with the long series of coo notes. The tone of the yellow-billed song is more throaty and deep than the black-billed, and he tends to go on and on as this bird did.

If especially aroused, the cuckoo is liable to break out into a raucous hollow cackling, similar to a jungle bird. The yellow-billed is much more prone to do this, but this bird's song was discrete and subdued. To get such a rare look at the secretive cuckoo is a treat enough. I would be happy just to hear one coo to me around here sometime soon.

The night is not usually silent, but sometimes it seems that way. In June the amphibians no longer croak or peep or trill incessantly, and the mid-summer buzz of cicadas has yet to begin. Rise from your bed in the dark or, even better, sleep in the woods some June night. If you are far enough from roads or airports you will first hear the silence, and then the dawn chorus.

Those birds that sing at dusk will also be the first to begin, the glorious thrushes. The soulful hermit thrush may send his pure haunting notes slowly into the stillness. The playful wood thrush may pipe his sprightly tune. The insistent veery may cast abroad his fluted sounds to fall down the scale into our ears. All this may happen, but what will surely happen is the robin will sing - and sing - and sing some more.

The American robin is a thrush, and even more surprising to many, it is a woodland thrush, not normally a resident of lawns and fields. It is common throughout the North American continent wherever there are at least a few trees. It has reached out from it forest origins to greet the intruding settler at his doorstep, forgiving him the thinning of the trees.

So wherever you are, expect the robin to be the first to greet the light of an approaching sun, and not just one or two robins. The dawn chorus is truly an effort of many voices, and you will be amazed at how many robins there really are in every neighborhood, or in the dark forest. As you walk along during the day you might see one or two and come to think that they are spread thinly over the land. But it is not so.

They are packed in as tightly as possible, each pair filling every small parcel of trees and openings, shoulder to shoulder and beak to beak. This is why you can depend on their song every day. The neighboring robin has to be told to keep his distance and stay in his allotted space. The more birds you have, the more they will sing.

After the thrushes start, then other species chime in. If you are in the woods, as we were last week in a campground on Mt Greylock, the wildest, broadest, tallest, mountain in Massachusetts, then you will hear the warblers of the spruce-fir forest.

Walking down the campground road, with the straight, stately northern evergreens around you, you will hear more treetop warblers than anywhere else in the state. This is their Massachusetts stronghold, and they are packed in like the robins, beak to beak. This is why they sing so steadily and long.

There are many places in the state where such warblers nest, even in the hills of Hampden County, but you will not hear such incessant song as on Greylock. There are a few blackburnian or magnolia warblers here wherever hemlock or pine are thick and tall. However, there are not enough birds to fill the space, so they have a lowered urge to sing. Why sing when there are few to challenge or reply?

They need each other to do their choral best, and best each other with ever louder and longer renditions of the score. Scoring is everything when there are many eggs that hatch into many mouths, each clamoring for the few worms and bugs in their parents chosen patch of woods. If there is none to answer, then time is better spent searching for food and feeding the young.

But the minutes before dawn are always best spent singing, since food is hard to find in the semi-light. So before dawn, even the woods where only a blackburnian warbler or two is resident will ring with their song. Other warblers, thrushes, and flycatchers join in then, and the chorus is complete, even if for a shorter time.

But when many birds of the same kind are nesting close, then the music rises to heights that may reach the moon and swell it to full shining. That night on Greylock the moon was swollen, setting as the birds were rising. Even a sleepy ear would welcome such an earthly choir. To hear it, all you have to do is rise early, or sleep out and wake early.