Arlene and I don’t wait for robins to show up. They’re not really signs of spring, anyway, around here. If you look, you can find robins all around the year in Massachusetts. That’s not to say they don’t go south for the winter. The ones that live here in the summer go south for the winter, and robins from Newfoundland come here for the winter. But anyway.
The chickadees and titmice have been sounding different the last few weeks, singing spring songs. But as for migrants, we saw one or two on Wednesday the 8th. Arlene came to meet me at lunchtime to walk around Cutler Park. We spotted a great blue heron in the cattails along the built-up side of the pond, trying to figure out how to handle a large fish it had caught. We were too far away from it to identify the fish, but it could have been a bass large enough for a human fisherman to keep legally. A little further around the pond we heard, then saw, one red winged blackbird singing in a tree over the water. That’s a bird that isn’t around in the winter. One of those two has to count as our first returning migrant bird of the spring.