Except the whip-poor-wills. Every year there have been fewer and fewer, and this year, not a one to be heard. If I want to see/ hear a nightjar I have to be content with the ones circling and beenting above the glaring lights at the local grocery store. It breaks my heart...even as few as ten years ago we had chuck-will's-widow's and the whips here and now nothing.

On a happier note, the spring migration really has my head spinning and my neck acheing. Let's see...in three days there were the following arrivals: pewees, great cresteds, two different vireos, yellowthroats, chats, (pause to breathe)both summer AND scarlet tanagers, the parulas of course showed up first, the hummers , rose-breasted GBs, blue grosbeaks, orioles, an immense herd of yellow-rumped warblers. Also making an appearance are the waterthrushes, blue-grey gnatcatchers (three nests now spotted) and a bonus, the barred-owl chick that recetly left the nest and is now exploring his flooded woodland world. All this water IS good for crawdads though, and the red-shouldered hawk couple is busy running relays back and forth to the chicks as fast as they can snap them up from the puddles. The bobolinks should be along any time.

And I really need a course on sandpipers and shorebirds, and the warblers. My husband called me on the cell in a frenzy, wanting to know what kind of bird he was watching at a low water crossing a few miles from here. I knew that without something definitive, a sqwak or a call or something I could hear on the phone I would be of no use whatsoever. It was terribly unafraid of the truck, but that's all I got. And to further confuse things, he is colorblind so asking what color the legs are or the bill if it isn't black, is a lost casue. When he got home and sat down with all my reference books, he decided it might have been a solitary sandpiper, but I certainly can't say. I have also almost given up on the LBJs (little brown jobs) by sight...if there isn't a noise or a tell-tale behavior readily apparent, I don't know what sparrow that is skulking in the fencerow.

A week or so ago I also had a first...a sandhill crane flew over. This really got me terribly excited as it was the first one I'd spotted locally. The people I was with were non-birders, in fact, with the exception of my husband, most of them were completely uninterested with nature in any form and I would really love nothing more than to smack their heads together. Did I just say that?