The County Beautiful ~ Birds Are Beginning To Sing

The County Beautiful

By Anne Hinshaw Wing

Birds Are Beginning To Sing

More cold weather is in store, despite this week’s warm days, but the sun rises earlier, the daylight hours are longer, and the birds are beginning to sing – a bit creakily at times, to be sure.

As much as two or three weeks ago, a tiny tsipping in the old white cedars outside my window told of the golden crowned kinglets finding invisible nourishment there. Bluejays and cardinals flit past the trees to feed at the feeding station, enlivening the late winter landscape with their rich colors, daubing momentarily with red or blue the dark trunks of oak and hickory, splashing color on the pines and spruces.

Black, Gray And White

The distant silver of aspen trunks seems repeated in the plumage of some of the familiar winter birds that, dress in black, gray and white — the chickadees with their black caps, the nuthatches in their dress suits, the titmouses with their perky crests, and the juncos that wear dark swallow-tailed coats with silvery white below the waist. These have been here all winter, feeding chummily alongside the russet-capped tree sparrows, the downy and hairy woodpeckers and the occasional English sparrows that are rather less welcome.

Mrs. Thomas McEachern of Harvard PI. told me that she and the doctor have seen Carolina wrens, evening grosbeaks, cedar waxwings and red-breasted nuthatches recently from their windows overlooking the Arboretum. The white-breasted nuthatch is far commoner hereabouts than the red-breasted, which prefers evergreens, whereas the white-breasted form is a resident of woodlands, village trees, orchards and the like. The white-breasted nuthatch is known by its black cap and beady black eye on a white cheek; the red-breasted, a smaller bird, is rustier beneath, with a broad black line through the eye and a white eyebrow streak; the cap is dark but not so black or so large in proportion to the head.

BLACK-CAPPED CHICKADEE

Says "chickadee-dee, dee, dee" and sings 2 high-pitched notes or sometimes 3. 3 x 8va "fee bee-

Some Songs Heard

Although the weather is still too cold to throw open our windows, a few songs are so penetrating that we hear them anyway from indoors. The “spring soon” song of the chickadee, musical and high-pitched, is whistled on two tones of the scale (the first higher than the second by a few half steps), for instance “A-G” or “B-G sharp,” in a sweet, clearly whistled bird-voice. Sometimes a “throb” or division in the utterance of the second tone makes it seem like two notes.

Of course the chickadee chatters away, saying its name in various ways, too, but the whistled song is really tone-music that anyone can whistle. Sometimes the human imitation fools the birds, and they come to see about it and to reply.

Birds still need feeding, so refill your suet container and seed tray, and put out your ear of corn or whatever you supply the birds. They will find other food as soon as the weather permits. Migrants will soon be passing through, if you haven’t already seen some of them, and certain winter residents will be ging on north to their breeding grounds.