Here’s the second installment of Singing in the Spring. The field sparrow looks more like a typical sparrow than the previously featured eastern towhee, but a close look reveals a handsome bird with subtle beauty.
Here’s the start of a new birdsofnewengland.com mini series called Singing in the Spring. It will feature, all together now, birds singing in the spring. The posts will appear randomly throughout this spring.
I’ll kick it off with an eastern towhee. Although a member of the sparrow family, which features mostly small brownish birds, the towhee is larger and much more decorated.
I’ve had the unpleasant experience of finding dead birds under windows several times in my life.
Whether at home, work or elsewhere, it’s always a sad sight to see a lifeless bird that has struck a window and become a statistic. It is estimated that more than a billion birds die each year in window collisions. That’s a billion with a b, as my dad used to say.
It’s even more horrific if you think about the bird’s final moment. One second, the bird is migrating, searching for food, fleeing from a predator, or simply going from point A to point B, and the next second, it’s dead on the ground. That’s if the bird is “lucky.” The unlucky ones are the ones that strike the window, fall to the ground and die painfully and slowly.
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Palm warblers have been by far the most visible spring migrants on my walks lately. Along with pine warblers and yellow-rumped warblers, palm warblers are one of the earliest returning warblers to New England. If you see a small yellow bird pumping its tail constantly, it’s probably a palm warbler.
The American black duck is, in my opinion, one of the more underrated birds in New England.
While it is true that black ducks are not the most exciting or colorful ducks in New England, I think the black duck is often overlooked because a lot of people assume it is a mallard. Mallards, of course, are extremely common and tame. Black ducks are not as common and certainly not as tame.
Differentiating an American black duck from a female mallard is one of the more common difficult identifications to make. It is up there with the house vs. purple finch and the sharp-shinned vs. Cooper’s hawk.
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I saw this guy on a cable wire road barrier on the way into work this morning. He, and other tree swallows present, made the drizzly morning commute that much better.
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.
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My first warbler (a pine warbler) showed up on March 31. Here are numbers two and three for the year: yellow-rumped warbler and palm warbler, both seen today (Friday, April 11, 2025). More to come in the weeks ahead!
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Here are more photos of the coyote I saw a few weeks ago at Huntington State Park in Redding, Connecticut. Here’s the full story.
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This is the second column in the last few weeks where I end up writing about and using a photograph of an unintended subject because the primary target fell through.
A few weeks ago, you may recall, I wrote about a missed opportunity to photograph blue jays harassing a barred owl. The blue jays successfully drove off the owl before I could get into position for a photo. On the walk back to the car, I came across a flock of cedar waxwings eating berries and stopped to photograph them.
This time, the intended target was American woodcock, but I ended up coming home with more photos of my coyote friend. Late in 2024, I wrote about getting lucky and spotting a coyote in a field as I passed a small break in the thick, tangled, brushy border between the woods and field. I’m assuming this was the same coyote, as I spotted it in the same field very near where I had seen it before.
But first, my intended target. American woodcocks, or timberdoodles, have been a nemesis species of mine for many, many years. I’ve seen their evening aerial displays a few times, but I haven’t found one during the day when getting a photograph would be possible. The aerial displays come shortly after sunset when the evening light has faded.
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Birds of New England.com 