Spring is here!

Picture it: temperature in the 40s, a bright sunny day, birdsongs in the air, and red-winged blackbirds visiting my feeders: SPRING IS HERE!

I walked out to fill the feeders and was overwhelmed by birdsong; everyone is feeling spring's life surging in them! All that song study I'd intended to do to prepare for this spring fell by the trigonometry wayside (but I have a B+ right now going into the midterm!), so I was indeed overwhelmed by the whistles, buzzy brrrs, and calls of so many birds who've only just arrived on the marsh. I watched for two hours to get my Project FeederWatch counts, and I realized that the seasons have changed. Some hellos and goodbyes are in order, as today marks my first official sightings and marked absences of the following:

Hello to red-winged blackbirds and brown-headed cowbirds.
Goodbye to white-throated sparrows and American tree sparrows, whose presence at the feeders will be sorely missed.

I took just a few photos in my song-filled daze. This is the first time I've seen a RWBlackbird at my feeder:

My first digiscope of the spring--I'll leave the vignetting so you can feel my woe at having a camera whose lens just gets farther away from the scope's eyepiece when I zoom it--update: I'll need to replace this pic with the uncropped one later:


A little song sparrow alit on the fence and timidly at first, then growing louder, sang his sweet-sweet-sweet-trilling song, the first song I learned to identify, after he filled his little belly with seed:


And a downy posed briefly for this shot:


What a great morning outside! I definitely need to get on the stick with the birdsong study; this whole "get home and study" thing really gets in the way of that, though!

I hope the weather holds. For the first time since daylight savings time began, I'm happy to be springing forward an hour because it gives me that much more sunlight to birdwatch after work. Trig will just have to wait until after sunset.