Good morning! This is a Dawn Chorus open thread featuring my May ‘18 photography yield, so feel free to share your bird pics, questions, sightings, sitings, citings, fantasies, and nightmares.
I’ve spent 39 of my 44 years in cities with long, brutal summers. This is an awkward fit for an outdoorsy guy with an aversion to excessive heat.
Accordingly, my perception of seasons has always been inverted from the European-influenced American mythology. Literature and culture tell us that spring is a joyous time — the colorful, festive rebirthapalooza that rewards us for surviving winter — while fall is an ominous harbinger of cold, darkness, and Buick ads. But to me, autumn means “woo hoo, we can go outside!” while spring foreshadows months of air-conditioned cabin fever.
The academic calendar, of course, is built around the traditional seasonal conception. So in this climate zone, the last hike-able afternoons are spent in term-paper grading marathons.
The end of the academic year is also a bittersweet time for any prof whose most reliable tonic against chronic depression is the sociality and frenetic pace of teaching and mentoring.
Fortunately, the “sweet” part of that bittersweetness is the increased bird activity.
This spring brought a bumper crop of migrants to my yard. My neighborhood — a 1960s tract whose mature trees make up for the decrepit strip malls — seems to have become a roadside diner for warblers. Within a single week I saw a Wilson’s:
Chestnut-sided:
Nashville (a lifer):
And yellow:
Meanwhile, my wintering orange-crowned warbler stuck around longer than usual and started singing:
During warbler week I also saw a summer tanager (female) in my yard:
And a few Lincoln’s sparrows:
Elsewhere around town, I got another lifer — a red-eyed vireo:
Just outside of town, two of our favorite summer visitors have arrived. Scissor-tailed flycatchers:
And painted buntings. After seeing my first ever a couple of weeks ago but just missing a photo, I had better luck the next week. The morning after I turned in my grades, I got up at 5:00 and drove to the Fort Worth Nature Center, a magnificent city-owned reserve of several different habitats and the reputed home of many painted buntings. It didn’t disappoint:
Other spring arrivals included catchers of various bugs:
As well as catchers of other really big, bug-like things:
I’ll end with one of the enduring icons of the traditional spring narrative: cardinal nookie.