It’s an early start to the warbler season for me.

I was walking at my usual patch on March 31 when I heard a familiar trill-like song from the top of a tall white pine. A fast-paced trilling usually means it is a junco, chipping sparrow, or pine warbler. All three of these birds are in New England now, so unless you are an expert at identifying birds by song, it is best to find the bird and get visual confirmation.

Like most warblers, pine warblers do not sit still for very long, so it took only a few seconds of searching to find the tiny bird moving among the branches. It was indeed a pine warbler, a mostly yellow bird with white wing bars on gray wings.

Pine warblers are always the first, or at least one of the first, warblers to show up in New England each spring. I usually do not find them until a few days into April, but this year, my first warbler sighting came on the last day of March.

Coincidentally, I saw my first chipping sparrow of the spring last week as well. Yes, spring migration is underway.

Spring migration, of course, starts much earlier with the arrival of red-winged blackbirds in February and eastern phoebes and American woodcocks around the middle of March, but the long-awaited songbird migration has started with a trickle.

AllAboutBirds.com, a website of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, writes that “pine warblers are often difficult to see as they usually stay high up in pines.” That was the case with this first pine warbler of the season the other day. As I continued my walk, I came across two more pine warblers. The second was lower on the bare branches of a small deciduous tree, and the third was trilling from the top of a towering pine.

Pine warblers are one of the few warbler species that visit feeders. The spring when COVID had the country on lockdown, I had pine warblers and yellow-rumped warblers on my suet feeders. While I wouldn’t wish for another pandemic in a million years, it was nice to be home watching the feeders all day.

Palm warblers are usually the second warbler species to arrive in New England in the spring. They are typically more accessible as they feed and spend most of their time much lower than pine warblers. Palm warblers may even be found on the ground at times. Palm warblers are also mostly yellow with a rusty cap, black eye stripe and brownish back. The real giveaway for palm warblers is the constant tail bobbing.

Eastern towhees, a large sparrow with awesome black, rust and white plumage and red eyes, will be here in a week or two as well. A few weeks after that, the songbird migration will be in full swing, and more colorful birds than I can even describe will be in our backyards, woods and fields.

The only downside to spring migration in many parts of New England is that we will lose most of our ducks. Ducks like common and hooded mergansers, ring-necked ducks, buffleheads and common goldeneyes will be heading to their secret spots up north to nest.

Thankfully, the songbirds will fill the void left by the ducks. Everything in birdwatching, as in life, is a tradeoff.