A dozen or more species of warblers regularly move through the area this month on their way from Canada to Central and South America, but even if you do find them, you can t tell them apart unless you re really good at it. They are a great source of frustration to the average birder like me. The males of some species retain enough color to permit identification, but you can t see them against the changing colors of the leaves, and they aren t singing. Hawks have started migrating. At the groundbreaking ceremony for Mother Seton School, while everyone else had their attention fixed on the speakers, I watched over 30 broad winged hawks riding a thermal directly overhead.
Hawks don t know how to sing any time of the year.
Instead of singing, we have to be satisfied with gossip and bickering. And then there are the blackbirds. They number in the thousands, and they arrive in a Hitchcockian stream a few hundred feet wide and stretching as far as the eye can see, from the farms where they spent the day foraging to the trees where they will roost for the night, squawking and clacking all the way. None of them can carry a tune, even in the spring. This will go on until the weather gets cold and the flocks drift further south.