Wild Things: Fall comes early in birddom

Red-eyed vireo 

Yellow warbler

By ED KANZE

By the first of August, fall is already in full spring, or at least it is if you’re a bird or birder. And by the middle of August, the plug has been fully yanked from the bathtub. The birds of summer are draining away.

Sometime in July, I tend to see my last yellow warbler of the year. Often a few weeks have to pass before I realize this brilliant yellow insect-eater has left us. Most people I know think of warm-weather birds as our birds, creatures that belong to our home places and leave us to pass winters far to the South. In spring, they turn around and come home. 

But this story probably reverses the truth. Birds such as the yellow warbler are likely tropical in origin. They evolved in the subtropics and tropics, and even after developing a taste for northern breeding grounds, perhaps because summer days are so much longer up here, they still spend more than half the year in South America, Central America, or the Deep South. Briefly, so-called neotropical migrants come north to feed, breed, and multiply.

Another bird that flies a long way to reach us here in order to find a mate, breed, raise offspring, and head back where it came from, is the red-eyed vireo. This may well be our most common bird in summer, at least in places where trees rich in inchworms abound. Red-eyed vireos spend more than half the year in the Amazon River basin. When spring is coming to our part of the world, they sense it and start winging northward.

In my neighborhood, red-eyed vireos typically arrive in late May or early June. By late August, a great many of them are already gone. One quirk of this short-timer among us is that it seems to vocalize later in the season than most of its fellow tropical migrants. As Labor Day approaches, I still hear the occasional red-eyed vireo song in the woods. The melody is low-key and repetitive, consisting of phrases of often three notes, followed by a pause, followed by another three-note phrase. Who am I? Pause. Vireo. Pause. Who are you? Pause. I don’t know.

Sandpipers move early, too. Along rivers and lakeshores in August it’s common to see solitary sandpipers. These are birds that nested, hatched eggs, and raised offspring (or were offspring themselves) way up north in Canada. By the time we think of as midsummer, they’re moving south in full fall migration. Some raptors begin heading southward around the same time.

Red-winged blackbirds are favorites of mine, and it’s a happy day when they arrive in our neighborhood in March. By midsummer, we can hardly find one. They move to big rivers and major inland lakes and the coast, there to gather in great numbers as they shift range southward for the winter.

Hummingbirds are a big deal at our place. While we still have squadrons of them buzzing around in mid-August, young are out of the nest and feeding on their own, and migration is poised to begin. We lose our ruby-throated males first. Then in a steady trickle go the green-and-white females and juveniles. I’m sorry to see them go, although I don’t miss the incessant chore of filling hummingbird feeders with sugarwater.

While birds are moving, other early signs of autumn appear on trees. Fall color might not peak, depending on the species, until late September or October, but a few trees or portions of trees lose their green by mid- to late-August. A common early turner is the red maple. On the whole, red maples reach the zenith of their color in late September, but by late August you don’t have to work too hard to find a few trees, or branches of trees, blazing in prime autumn scarlet.