Another essay from Herschel Raney.

>The Yellow-rumped Warblers are putting on warpaint: buttercup
>slashes under the wings, black face masks, white eye liner. The
>males are giving up their winter chips and giving the full song a
>go. This is what I am here for?singers. The ears and the memory
>banks are full of winter sparrow chips and chickadees, it is time
>for a sonic purge.
>
>
>
>At the bridges of Bell a singer starts us off. The diminutive one,
>the Ruby-crowned Kinglet, he sits still inside a twirl of brush and
>vibrates with his drawn fidgeting whistle. Another jazzy artist like
>the Winter Wren, he goes and goes, ignoring my closeness. I would
>like to see the kinglet and the wren go head to head.
>
>
>
>The peepers are adding their song to the chorus frogs and the
>leopards out where the water is still collected. The shale path is
>torn from the high water of winter, gone now to the river and the
>gulf. The wet flats are scattered with frog calls, awaiting
>bitterns. The temperature is not quite right for the frogs yet. It
>is 45 degrees. The sky is low and waiting for a fog burn off.
>
>
>
>It is dizzying to look for other warblers inside the flycatching
>masses of Yellow-rumps along the creek. I would hate to estimate
>their numbers. They sing and sing and sing. I am glad to hear them.
>Mallards lift and fly every twenty yards or so. A Song Sparrow
>starts a song and goes so start and stop, so stutteringly unsure of
>what he is doing he sounds like some mystery bird. I find him
>though, inflated and vocal. He seems mystified by his own urges. A
>few feet a way a Hermit Thrush sits smug and silent. With the throat
>play he is capable of, I can only imagine his thought as being
>?surrounded, as always, by amateurs. Jeesh.?
>
>
>
>Above the wet areas, flowers hearten the walking world. Hedyotis in
>a white to purple spectrum, Dentaria, the bright yellow Corydalis, a
>single Thalictrum still folded in a purple ball, Verbena, one
>woodland Buttercup. White-throated Sparrows go among flowers. Soon
>the Senecio towers will rupture and we will all be blinded by
>yellow. At the base of one thin oak, Resurrection Fern is, well,
>resurrecting into stiff green.
>
>
>
>At the warbler fall-out area, all the fall-out is in my head. Pine
>Warblers call in several directions. Likely they are on the move.
>The towhees continue. More Yellow-rumps are there and there and
>everywhere. A Winter Wren bubbles off in the brush. And then the
>singer and the song that has flown in just for me and the morning
>comes through, close up the hillside?the wheezy seesaw is back. A
>single male Black-and-white Warbler works the treebark and throws
>back his head to make me shake my own noggin. Bring it on you little
>zebra bird.
>
>
>
>Down the path another kinglet serenades me. I make a small applause
>for him. And then I look up toward the fog as if I have had a
>premonition, at the exact moment that five beats of tewww come down
>from the throat of a passing Greater Yellowlegs. I try to see the
>bird falling out of the sky but there is nothing. The flats await
>him. The quacks of the ducks hidden out there are the only answer he
>gets. Ahead, the red-wings gabble in the treetops among pressured
>treebuds. The woods are nearly ready. The oaks are nearly ready. We
>are certainly ready, despite our rusty auditory apparatus. The
>yellowlegs is just a scout; a welcome thing in the ear. The stingy
>tropics need to gift the globe above them, South America needs to
>open its skylanes and let the rest of the singers loose.
>
>
>
>Herschel Raney
>
>Conway AR

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