Back Home by Chris Hardie
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The changing of the seasons is affirmed with the arrival of our migrating avian friends. These actual snowbirds have come to tell us that spring is here.
Robins are the traditional harbinger of spring and these early achievers can deal with late-winter snow, but over the past few weeks I’ve spotted orioles, swallows, finches and hummingbirds.
Apparently even the avians disliked our spring weather this year. The migration pattern is normally much more spread out over April and May, but many of the birds didn’t book their flights until the last minute, causing a winged traffic jam.
According to the website Birdcast.info – which tracks and predicts the migration patterns of the birds – the peak of this year’s migration was May 10 when nearly 28 million birds landed in Wisconsin.
Thankfully there were no reports that I heard of any avian air disasters, but I really enjoyed watching – and hearing – the new arrivals. Last week after spotting an oriole, I placed a container with grape jelly in the branches of our crabapple tree. It didn’t take long for the birds to discover one of their favorite foods.
My wife Sherry prepared some hummingbird water and soon the males – the first to return to stake out territory – were back buzzing the bushes around our porch.
A few years ago we had a delightful couple stay at our inn for a few days. They watched the hummingbirds with great joy and fascination. It was special to them, they said, because they had never seen a hummingbird before but said they were mentioned in the Quran.
The male red-winged blackbirds were actually here prior to our heavy snowstorm on April 17 because they flocked to our bird feeder for sunflowers while contemplating a class action lawsuit against their travel agent for the early booking. Now they are staking their territorial claims to nesting areas along our creek and are quick to scream their protests and fly around my head if they think I am getting too close.
The barn swallow population seems to have been less the past few years, but I welcome their presence every spring and summer. I’m willing to tolerate the messy nests in the old dairy barn because they are our natural mosquito predators and we can enjoy sitting outside in the evenings without being eaten alive.
The one migrating bird that is rarely seen but heard is the whippoorwill. Nothing says summer nights more to me than the call of the whippoorwill, which instantly takes me back to my childhood and listening to the bird as I drifted off to sleep. It was the whippoorwill that greeted Sherry and I back home a few days after we moved to the farm in 2006.
We were sitting on the porch at dusk listening to the gobbles of turkeys settling in for the night and singing frogs from the creek. An owl hooted. In the distance, we heard the voice of the whippoorwill.
It was as if the bird was signing “welcome home, welcome home.”
It was about 4 a.m. recently when we heard the distinctive call from just outside our window.
A little early for a wake-up call, but one we appreciated nonetheless.
“Welcome home to you,” I silently whispered.
Chris Hardie spent more than 30 years as a reporter, editor
