Songs of April

Ah, April on Cape Cod! I recorded this last week, so I don’t actually know what the weather is like right now. I’m in Florida so I, of course, hope it’s cold on the Cape, which is a good bet. But spring is coming, cold or not. From the songbirds’ perspective, the most important thing is that the buds on trees and shrubs are swelling, which triggers the hatching or reactivation of the billions of tiny caterpillars that will first fatten up and then feed transient and locally breeding birds alike.
 
Soon those birds will include the brightly colored crowd-pleasers of May – the orioles, warblers, buntings and other preening pretty-boys coveted by spring birders. With them comes the spring symphony of all their lusty songs, ones you haven’t heard in almost a year in some cases, which can be overwhelming after a relatively quiet winter. But for now we tune up our ears on the relatively small number of birds showing up.
 
One morning late last week I woke up to the sound of some new arrivals to my yard, a couple of mid-April classics – Eastern Towhees and White-throated Sparrows. Both are handsome, with crisp, contrasty patterns that make the most of their black, white, and brown palette. But their songs may be their best features. The male towhee’s “drink your tea!” song is iconic in these parts, where have plenty of the shrubby, regenerating oak forest they crave. Both sexes make a distinctive “chewink” call, often the first indication they are in the neighborhood.
 
White-throated Sparrows are here in winter, sometimes under backyard feeders, but like juncos they are much more common on the mainland – I had one lonely individual winter in my neighborhood this year. In April we get an influx of migrants that wintered further south, so you might wake up one day, as I did, to suddenly hear their charming whistled song, which comes in two versions, the rising one: and the remix. The common mnemonic is “Old Sam Peabody” or “Sweet Canada, Canada.” Interestingly, some researchers figured out a third, two-syllable song type that originated in Western Canada back in the late 90s, then went sort of viral, spreading east across the continent within 20 years. They surmised that birds were learning the new song on the wintering grounds where different breeding populations mix, sort of like when I would work in Texas for a few months and come home with a drawl.
 
Yellow-rumped Warblers are in the same category of birds who winter here in small numbers but then numbers balloon when migrants are passing through in April. I’ve been watching several at my feeders slowly molt from the subdued gray of winter to… a somewhat less subdued gray. No, they are actually good-looking birds in spring, with bright yellow crowns and sides, a black mask, and cadet gray back and wings with black streaks. I’m hearing their song every day now, and I’m not going to kid, you, it’s not impressive. But consider it a warmup for the dizzying variety of warbler songs to come in a few weeks.
 
And while you’re tuning up your birding ears, you should also be getting that hummingbird feeder out – the first Ruby-throated Hummingbird scouts were reported back on the 16th on the Cape others as far as central Maine already. Do you remember their song? It’s ok if you don’t remember the words – you can always just hum it.