February Thaw - part 1

Tuesday

The ice at work is slowly melting. The pond is like a Mars landscape, fields of dirty yellow with red accents and everywhere pockmarked by old deer prints. Chickadees twitter back and forth across the paths, seemingly excited by the warmth.

A robin song draws me away from the water, and I find the singer sitting with another robin a little ways off from a flock. Maybe it was a male thinking about claiming territory, but robins can sing occasionally throughout the winter and both birds flew back toward the flock after a while. These bursts of song are just preludes to the main event when the forests will bustle with the serious business of mate-finding and territory defense. I'm not the only one who tastes spring in this temporary thaw.

These robins have been flocking for at least a week in this area of young trees and exotic shrubs. The branches of alien buckthorn here are still laden with wrinkled black berries which also sustain a different flocking bird, the cedar waxwing. I find myself in the midst of a huge congregation. Every movement I follow with my binoculars finds another cluster of waxwings adorning slowly moving branches. These are one of my favorite birds. Their bodies are silky brown and they wear velvet black masks. They bring splashes of color to the brown landscape - yellow tipping their tail and waxy red gracing the tips of their wings. (You can see a picture here. I don't have a good lens for taking bird pictures yet). The air hums with their buzzing calls, almost as if I'm standing under a transformer on a utility pole.

I watch some birds pluck berries from the buckthorn, while others rest on bare branches. The waxwings flock and eat mostly fruit all year long, but the flocks that will spend the summer in our area will be much smaller than this. This is another sneak preview to the big migration push in spring when so many more species will gather in flocks along their migration routes.