Suddenly...

Suddenly, the wind is blowing out of the south.

Suddenly, bare trees have foliage, sprouting bright new red flowers or yellow skeins of seeds or green leaves. Even the larches, the only conifer that sheds its needles and goes bare in fall, look alive again as I hike through Greystone.

Carolina wrens will sing just about any time of the
day or year.

Suddenly, there is bird song, usually in the early morning but frequently all day. The carolina wren likes to sing anytime, and so do the titmouse, the white-breasted nuthatch and the cardinal. I go on my early morning walks into Greystone and find these birds plus robins, chipping sparrows, bluebirds, white-throated sparrows, mockingbirds and redwinged blackbirds. Even the fish crows are doing their croaking song. Vultures circle over my head and rise as the sun warms the air.

This is the most wonderful time of year for me. Every day there’s something new. One day the phoebes show up to build their nest under the bridge over a brook. Another day a female hooded merganser comes to a Greystone pond, joining the wood ducks and mallards. A lovely, trilling and unfamiliar song turns out to be a rubycrowned kinglet.

Suddenly, there are birds on nests. Harold and Maud, the redtails, are taking turns sitting on their eggs as the trees leaf out and make it harder to see the nest. A robin is suddenly seen sitting snugly on her little nest on a lower branch of a tree. A Canada goose is sits still on her nest on the side of a pond, a good place, undisturbed by people (although vulnerable to animal predators) but easy for someone who knows where it is to see her.

The other morning I watched a Cooper’s hawk break branches and take them to the top of a spruce over a busy street. Cooper's are agile flyers, able to hunt birds in deep woods, so this one could easily make its way through the branches to its nest and disappear into the evergreen foliage.  When the young are born and need feeding the other birds will have to watch out.

Suddenly, just as the trees are covered in seeds and the leaves obscure the branches, the warblers show up.

This pine warbler was singing, making it easy to find
despite the bad light and how high it sat.

Of course they do. If there is anything more aggravating than a warbler WAY UP THERE in the leafy treetops with the sun behind it, making a silhouette of its identifying pattern, I don't know it. They can literally be a pain in the neck.

I don’t know why it is many birders tend to go nuts when it comes to warblers. Maybe it is because when they come through seeking them among the leaves makes it almost a game. Maybe it is because there are so many different types to find. Maybe it's the sheer joy of suddenly realizing by that certain leaf movement that something is up there, something new and different that you don't see every day.

For me it is because in spring the warbler males are in their bright breeding colors and singing, so even if you can’t see it, you can identify it if you know the song.

It took until early April before my husband and I found palm and pine warblers - the early ones - along with some myrtle warblers that didn't mind New Jersey's relatively warm winter and cold, windy spring. They were all looking for insects in trees along the Passaic River. It was weeks later that I heard a prairie warbler and saw a black and white warbler - one of the few with no yellow in it - in a Bergen County park. I feel as though I'm way behind on my warblers.

At Garrett Mountain, which towers over the gritty city of Paterson, warbler seekers have already found hooded warbler and Louisiana waterthrush along with the myrtles, pines and palms. Garrett is one of those places known as a migrant “trap,” an area of natural habitat surrounded by an urban area. Birds tired after a night of flying with the south tailwind need a place to feed and rest, and that bit of green in a built-up area looks very appealing.

Central Park in New York City is probably the best known migrant trap, but anywhere you have a park or at least some greenery you will find a migrant. Even the enclosed courtyard of my office building, in the middle of a glass box, has had birds fly in for a day or two.

You never know what you’ll see, and it’s the prospect of something new that makes one willing to get out of bed in the dark and walk for miles hoping to see a bit of movement, hear a tiny chip call, something that will draw you to a bird you’ve never seen before or haven’t seen for years

It’s nuts, but it’s a lot of fun and it’s why you’ll see me out there absurdly early in the morning at this time of year.

Harold and Maud

When Pale Male, the redtailed hawk made famous in story and song, chose to put a nest on the side of a ritzy Fifth Avenue apartment building on Manhattan island, he made it very easy on birders.

The nest is high on the building and not obscured by trees. It is easily seen by binoculars or scope - or even by eye, if you know where to look - from a bench near the Hans Christian Andersen statue on the east side of Central Park, near the Conservatory Water where kids race model boats.

At this time of year, when Pale Male and his female of the moment - he's lost a few mates over the years - are trying to create or are raising the next generation, the bench draws a big crowd. Those afar can follow their exploits via a number of websites including that of Marie Winn, who wrote the book on Pale Male.

In the wild, redtails and other hawks are not usually so accommodating. The idea is to hide the nest from predators, including people whose idea of a good time is shooting raptors with guns or, in the case of one unfortunate turkey vulture I and others saw flying in central New Jersey, an arrow.

But sometimes the hawks will show you where the nest is, inadvertently, and it is up to those of us given this gift to protect it.

Look closely to see the redtailed hawk on the nest.

That’s why I’m not going to tell you where Harold and Maud (named for the 1971 movie, but without the e in her name) put their nest in Englewood Cliffs, NJ.

I do a lot of walking on my lunch break out of a desire to be outside and exercising in daylight after hours behind the computer in a windowless pit of a room. Before my part of the company moved to the pit, our desks were in a sunnier locale and every so often I would see a redtailed hawk fly over the parking lot in back, sometimes perching in a tree close by.

Being close to the Palisades, the majestic cliffs along the west shore of the Hudson River north of the George Washington Bridge, there is always a good chance of seeing turkey vultures, redtails and peregrine falcons. During fall migration last year there were bald eagles, sharp-shinned and cooper’s hawks and the occasional osprey and great blue heron. All of them were following the Hudson south, using the warm air off the cliffs to stay aloft.

But there is a local raptor population, too. On a recent break I was heading across the parking lot to the back door when a redtail flew over my head and perched on the end of the building. Having only my cellphone camera, I tried to get closer for a picture. Just as I was about in the right place another redtail flew into a tree across the lot and this one flew over and they mated for a few seconds, then flew off separately.

I wonder if there’s a nest somewhere close by, I thought.

I put it out of my mind until a week later when I was on another walk across the lot and a redtail flew over. That made me wonder where the nest was.

There are limited choices thanks to being such a built-up area where trees are cut down in favor of bigger houses, highways and office parks and what's left over has to be "preserved." There's a small bit of woods to the north, a smaller bit of woods to the west and the woods left as a border on either side of the Palisades Interstate Parkway, which was built atop the cliffs and runs into New York. To the south you’re heading to the busy Englewood Cliffs-Fort Lee-George Washington Bridge area.

For some reason, intuition perhaps?, I started looking at the trees to the west, from a corporate parking lot. Just as I found a suitable candidate the female hawk landed in it, the male landed on her, they noisily mated for a few seconds and then the male flew to the tree next to me and preened over my head!

It is an amazingly public nest but the public doesn’t notice. The next day I looked at the nest from another vantage point on a street and watched as people biked, walked or jogged under it, not noticing the nest or the hawks flying around. Most people don’t. If they see something they may briefly wonder what it is and then go back to their own earthbound lives.

One of the hawks circled high overhead, then swooped down and landed in a tree not particularly close to the nest. I knew it could see me - redtails have excellent vision, much better than humans, to snag squirrels and other things on the ground from a high perch - and wasn’t going to tip me off to the nest. So I walked on and made my way down the street and came back to my original vantage point in the parking lot. I noted the best place to stand, knowing I would later be taking some pictures, including the one above, with my telephoto lens.

Each day I have stopped to look for a few minutes during my break, staying just long enough to find the nest and see what's happening. Each time one of the redtails has been in the nest, which means there are eggs to keep warm. Hunkered down in the nest I can't tell if it's Harold or Maud because they take turns incubating and it is only when they fly that you see the female is bigger than the male to accommodate those eggs she'll be laying.

I don’t know if I will be able to see the miracle of several redtailed hawk chicks peering over the edge of the nest or watch them fledge. At some point the trees will leaf out and obscure them.

I can only hope the nest isn’t blown down, the tree isn’t cut down or the chicks don’t fall down. I hope I am not noticed in my vigil in these days when standing with binoculars in a parking lot is looked on with suspicion by Security. In any event I don't stay long. I don't trust people when it comes to nature. Most are too selfish, too inclined to do what they want, when they want and not give a damn about the consequences to others. That behavior runs the gamut from sterile landscape plantings to cutting down healthy but apparently inconvenient trees to overdoing the pesticides to putting the cat out at night.

It's not like Pale Male up there on his building ledge with his loyal, devoted fan club. Still, I find the experience of watching Harold and Maud just as thrilling.