The voice of a lone white-throated sparrow singing ‘Oh, sweet Canada, Canada, Canada’ rang out through dim hemlock forest as I ran our back road with Pepper this morning. It seemed like an echo of spring on the far side of summer. I wondered if the whitethroat was a juvenile bird trying out its voice, or simply a male making its presence known one last time before heading south for the winter. Two weeks ago, I heard a blue-headed vireo calling from somewhere in our yard. Another echo of spring.
Dark-eyed juncos flushed from the roadside as I ran, giving away their identity by the white flashes of their tail edges. Last Sunday, while hiking in the Gully Lake Wilderness Area, I saw numerous American robins and northern flickers. On Monday, when Vilis and I canoed the Waugh River, I noted a bald eagle, a flock of blackbirds, a spotted sandpiper, and small flocks of common mergansers and black ducks. During the past weeks, I’ve observed large congregations of starlings perching on power lines, and flocks of gulls wheeling over the Waugh’s estuary or foraging in wet pastures, hayfields, and freshly-plowed fields. In our yard, song sparrows still flit among the drying stalks in my flowerbeds, collecting fallen seeds. Mourning doves bob-step over the lawn and trail white-bordered, diamond-shaped tails when flushing into flight.
White-throated Sparrow (© Magi Nams)
So, our summer avifauna remains in part, no doubt fueling its collective metabolic furnace for the flight to wintering grounds to the south. The prominent voices in the autumn air are those of resident species – black-capped chickadees, blue jays, northern ravens, and American crows. Woodpeckers call out their sharp vocalizations – the little downy with its ‘pik!,’ the hairy with its ‘peek!,’ and the crow-sized pileated with its bold-as-brass ‘kek-kek-kek!’ Occasionally, I hear an American goldfinch on the wing chirping out its ‘po-ta-to-chip‘ call. Ring-necked pheasants rub the air raw with their grating vocalizations, and ruffed grouse rustle dead leaves with cautious steps and whip the air into a frenzy with their explosive bursts of flight. These sounds I’ll take with me into winter.
