Harbinger

I was right. Spring is coming. A little bird told me so. He sat on a Phragmites stem and belted his song out into the golden late afternoon sunshine, challenging everything within hearing distance -- particularly the rival singing from a sumac bush across the road. A few days of warmth, a few extra minutes of daylight and suddenly the birds are stirring. We've begun to see the first few early migrants: a handful of Tree Swallows coursing over the dunes at The Meadows, two Northern Gannets gliding north over the sea, a growing number of Forster's Terns snoozing on the low-tide sandbars at Miami Beach. And the songsters are starting to tune up again. The grating "oralee" of the Red-winged Blackbirds is one of my first hints that the change in seasons is really on its way. Soon, the lovely liquid warble of American Robins singing their dusk songs will convince me spring is finally here.

A male Red-winged Blackbird