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There's a new episode available of my podcast "This Birding Life."

This episode (#36!) is a new type, I'm calling "Ear Candy" because it's audio-only. This is my attempt at creating shorter (but I hope no less interesting) episodes in between the longer episodes that come in both audio and enhanced audio (with images) formats. The longer episodes (I'm working on one about birding in Israel right now) take me a much longer time to create, which often means there are long lags between episodes. Which is why I'm hoping that Science can perfect cloning soon.


This episode "Sounds of Spring at Indigo Hill" is built with audio field recordings I did with my iPhone. And there's a bit of narration tossed in between. I hope you like it.

I'd also like to thank Carl Zeiss Sports Optics for their sponsorship support of "This Birding Life" and Podcast Central.

I am working from the farm for the next 10 days or so, trying to get some writing done on the next book project. It's a bleak, raw day here—every single thing seems to be some shade of gray, drab olive, or brown. The utterly bare branches of the deciduous trees, devoid of swelling buds, beseech the sky to let the sun come out to play. Even the normally cheery carmine red of the northern cardinals seems subdued. 'Round these parts we call this book-writin' weather. May as well, it's too muddy and bone-chilling to be outside.

There are a couple of subtle signs of spring among the feathers. And for this I am truly thankful.

• The male American goldfinches are showing just a few small spots of bright yellow spring finery.
• Stick your head outside and you'll hear spring singing already! Cardinal, white-breasted nuthatch, tufted titmouse, Carolina chickadee, American robin, Carolina wren, and song sparrow are all in spring tune-up mode.
• The red-tailed hawks at the end of our driveway are perching a bit closer together each day. One day soon they'll be close enough to touch each other, and we all know what happens next boomchickywahwahchickywahwah.
• And finally, now, when I see a Carolina wren, I nearly always see TWO Carolina wrens. A small wisp of moss on the bird feeder tells me they are already nest building in the copper bucket under the front door eave.

I admire our birds for how they carry on living despite the fact that the weather is bleak and cold. I'd admire them even more if one of them would get in here and help me finish this book chapter.

OK the bleariness of the Ohio winter has settled in upon us and signs of spring, well, there are none! Sigh.

There's one specific sign that I look for each spring—one that lets me know that the ambient daytime temperatures are warm enough for there to be airborne insects. The air above our southeastern Ohio woods is peppered with gnats...

It's the return of the blue-gray gnatcatchers! They return in spring sometime in early April, usually around the 5th. Once they're back, they are with us until early October, giving away their presence with their high-pitched wheezing calls.

What's facing us now here in Ohio is about six months of gray skies and icky weather. Funny that a bird as gray as our winter skies can be such a harbinger of the joys and colors and music of spring.

I. Can't. Wait!

Oh how I wish our wonderpup, Chet Baker, Boston terrier, could be trained to find morel mushrooms using his highly sensitive nose. That would make him truly useful in ways that transcend his utility as a companion animal and terror to the bunnehs.

I LOVE all of spring's wondrous bounty: the returning songbirds, the hillsides bursting with blossoms, the greening of the landscape, the warmer weather, the almost vastly improved Pittsburgh Pirates...but right up there in my top five or so spring things is the ephemeral appearance of edible fungi.

We'll be eating morels most nights this week thanks to the wet spring and warming temps of recent sunny days. It's good to be alive.

Photo by Julie "Don't Say Anything Mean About Chet Baker" Zickefoose.

I found further proof, thanks to today's balmy weather, that writing about birds is much easier when you can write with the windows open, bird song floating in on the gentle breeze. Spring!

However there is this caveat: Spring in mid-March (at least here in southeastern Ohio) is a teasing vixen. She'll let you glimpse her rapturous beauty and catch a whiff of her sweet perfume, but reach out for her expectantly and she'll slap your face with three days of sleet and snow.


She'll make you watch while she coats the daffodils in frost and forces the timberdoodles to forage in roadside ditches. She'll bruise your heart with her apparent cold-hearted cruelty, but that's just spring's natural way of making you truly thankful when she arrives for real.

And on that day, each year, I drop to the ground and roll around in the new green grass, trying my best to hug the entire Earth.