(Original version published in September 2023)
The birds wake me from a coma of despair. The silhouette of a hawk circling over Windsor Park reminds me that beneath the taut strained muscles of my upper arms, adventure persists. Excitement lingers around each corner, and there it remains so long as I continue to look for it.
The air is cooler now. The rains have returned, albeit timidly, for they too are out of practice. As my own powers of observation shake off the dust of atrophy, so too must the rain rediscover its voice in a pounding rooftop patter, its visage in a sparkling veil of water.
We opened my bedroom blinds for the first time in months. The live oak, with its hip asymmetrical cut courtesy of February's ice, harbors warblers and cardinals in strands of wavering light. A warbler flits about the dramatically drooping locks of cadmium green. Occasionally, it descends to the ground, snags some thing from the still-dead grass, and re-ascends into the tangled limbs. It flashes in the light a yellowy hue, so, my first guess, of course, is a Yellow Warbler.
The aptly-named bird made its first appearance in our yard a few weeks ago. Butter yellow save for a prominent black eye, it traversed the messy thicket along the back fence, springing from one small branch to another. The untidy jumble was once something that needed to be tamed: roses climbing haphazardly into the hackberries, shawls of morning glories bursting forth. And yet, something in that wild green muddle had enticed this beautiful bird. It alighted, for a moment, on a wayward stem, and resumed its search for insects.
Yellow Warblers don’t breed in Austin, so we rarely hear them sing. The same goes for warblers of any kind, really. But on a warm Tucson morning, I finally got to experience what I’d been missing. A glorious sweet-sweet-sweet-I’m-so-sweet rang through the willows and cottonwoods of Sweetwater Wetlands, interrupted only by the witchety-witchety-witchety of a Common Yellowthroat—another bird that seldom sings here. At last I knew the wonders of a forest filled with the songs of warblers!
Today, the quick and quiet movements are a song all their own. It’s the song of our second spring: when the relief of rain and mild temperatures prompts an autumn bloom. The rock roses lift their pink faces skyward. The violet sage attracts a bumblebee. I watch as it nuzzles the petals.
Enjoy the birds,
Eric