Nature Done Wright

My latest column for the Record is about experiencing a fall-out.

Here's to spring-time's morning chorus 

By Jim Wright

Special to The Record | USA TODAY NETWORK – NEW JERSEY

      Early May is primetime for migrating songbirds in North Jersey, and if you’re in the right place at the right time, you might experience what birders call “ a fallout.” I experienced one last year just after sunrise along the Hudson River Palisades, and it was unforgettable.

      All I had to do was sit on a large rock and absorb the natural world around me.

      A wood thrush sounded the morning’s first few notes – an avian pitch pipe to get the morning chorus in tune. For the next hour, the choir performed, sometimes in unison and sometimes each bird doing its own solo or riff.  

    By staying stock still, I experienced that magical moment when migrating warblers stop to refuel and rest en masse. I think of it as the opposite of the fall raptor migration. The birds of prey are large, southbound, and riding the wind for all to see. The fly-by-night warblers are tiny and heading north.   

   But here’s the thing. Last May on the Palisades, the little songbirds were so near that I should have been able to see them without binoculars. But the spring foliage was so thick that I could only get glimpses, and the warblers were making so many distinctive calls and lilting songs that I couldn’t begin to identify them. 

    Aside from five hungry black-and-white warblers in search of insects on a tree trunk in front of me, I couldn’t see the panoply of passerines. In exasperation, I activated my phone’s Merlin app to help me recognize and document the sundry sounds.

    Merlin worked overtime to help with the IDs. The app on my phone soon blinked yellow with a cascade of names: northern parula, yellow-rump, black-throated green, magnolia, yellow, Wilson’s, Nashville, ovenbird, chestnut-sided, yellow-throated, blackpoll, and cerulean. Their garrulous vireo cousins chimed in: blue-headed, warbling, and red-eyed. Indigo buntings and scarlet tanagers joined the chorus, creating a rainbow of colorful melodies. 

     A Baltimore oriole performed a solo, and the other birds started calling as well – great crested flycatcher, hairy woodpecker,  blue jays, robins, mo-dos, grackles, chimney swifts, white-breasted nuthatches, American crows, northern flickers, red-bellied woodpeckers, tufted titmice, and even the faint honks of boisterous Canada geese, and white-throated sparrows singing their swan songs before heading back north,

  The blackpoll warbler may have been the star of the recital. It travels up to 12,000 miles round trip each year between North and South America – thought to be the longest migration of any songbird in the Western Hemisphere.

     In faraway places like the Central American nation of Belize, a morning chorus of this magnitude is a frequent event. Here in North Jersey, it is nothing short of magical.

      So many of nature’s most amazing little miracles occur all around us, if we’d only stop to look – and listen.

     The Bird Watcher column appears every other Thursday. Jim’s latest book is "The Screech Owl Companion.” Email Jim at celeryfarm@gmail.com.