Watching

Spring wildflowers in the forest hide in plain sight. I only recently started to notice the pale hepaticas among the ubiquitous mud and leaf litter. Fortunately the bumblebee that whizzed by me this morning is not working with the same color spectrum that we see. Insects are the desired audience for these flowers, but the single trout-lily leaves popping up everywhere have no need to attract attention. They leave that drama to their older or just healthier compatriots.

The pleasure of spring flowers strewn like tiny gems across the landscape is worth a closer look, but birds make it easier to watch them this time of year. Males of different songbird (not a technical term) species are walking that fine line between advertising their presence and avoiding predators. Many dress in eye-catching plumage, or at least spiff up their non-breeding plumage so that, for example, male robins sport a darker head and breast. There are always variations – eastern phoebes are little gray and off-white birds that don’t even bother differentiating the plumage of males and females. However they make up for it with their insistent singing of their own name: “Feebee!” This is another way songbirds draw our eyes, by singing species-specific songs from relatively conspicuous perches. I say relative because finding a flycatcher that is about the size of a cell phone in a mess of branches or bramble is not always an easy task.

We’re not the intended audience here either, and sometimes we can be ignored when too males are locked in showy combat. Recently I was able to walk close to two red-winged blackbirds that were going at each other with noisy wing beats. They tumbled about some cattails then spilled out onto the foot path where they irritated a robin so much that he joined in the fight and chased them off.

Most of this is drama, not violence. Individuals bluff and test each other to determine who has control of what resources. Eventually both the singing and the fighting will calm down as neighbors settle in and mostly ignore each other. Until then, there’s plenty for us to observe. Most of our warblers haven’t even arrived yet – not to mention all the trout lilies, trilliums, mayapples, and other flowers I’m looking forward to seeing soon.