The trees have filled out in leaves and warblers.

I’m not much of a birder, as I’ve said before. I don’t go out of my way for new species, or pester birds until I can positively identify them. I stopped trying to record my first observations of spring migrants when I realized that there are many dedicated birders in this area doing basically that. Meanwhile I find myself distracted for days by work or unrelated interests.

Let them make the efforts. There is limited scientific use for opportunistic sightings. It’s hard to show absence without a systematic effort since a bird might be where you didn’t look. Even with surveys birds don’t always vocalize or otherwise make their presence known. The other problem with data collection as a hobby is that sample size tends to be fairly low if the effort is small. The sample size of a first arrival record is often one, which may mean very little for the population as a whole.

I still notice birds everywhere I go. Spring migrants are old friends whose return signals that life is continuing on in its current version of normal. Wood thrushes sing haunting melodies that drift into our bedroom and brighten up our morning along with the sunrise. Scarlet tanagers bring splashes of tropical color to the woods and kingfishers rattle over dark ponds once again claimed for kingfisher kind. Common yellowthroats take up their stations along the pond. Their song is as welcome as the turtles returning to their logs to soak up the sun.

These things happen without me. Unlike so much in modern life, I don’t need to do anything except delight in them. Still, there is some twinge of anxiety at inaction – otherwise why all the blog posts and photos? There’s this innate conviction that having a record makes the subject more real, or more permanent. This is an attractive thought when considering a landscape which is impermanent in geologic time, and perhaps even in human time the way development and climate change might go. Perhaps it would provide some comfort if these species assemblages melted away like the glacier that stood here some 10,000 years ago.

But records are necessarily incomplete and reflect a human bias alien to so many of the beings that would be missed. I have to feel that the existence of impermanent things still has meaning, even if twenty years from now the deer eat all the trilliums or if garlic mustard, despite our best effort, smothers all the trout lilies. Otherwise what hope do any of us mortals have?