In the tundra of the Far North, the wind blows steadily and sometimes fiercely. It ruffles the feathers of one Long-billed Dowitcher as he faces south, into the teeth of the wind. His mate stands nearby, her feet in one of the innumerable puddles that nourish the insect larvae hatching all across Alaska. It is the larvae that have brought the dowitchers so far from their southern homes, to a feast for them and their hatchlings.

But food is not what the dowitchers have in mind now. They have done what they came here to do. Their babies, only a few days old, are already able to care for themselves. It is time for the parents to go.

Without a backward look, the male spreads his wings, catches the wind, and flies. His mate watches him leave with no regrets, no memory even that will draw them back together again. There are plenty of dowitchers in the tundra for her to choose from next year.  For now, she too feels the pull of migration, but she will catch another wind, another night.

On Saturday, the male arrived at the Fill. The warm breeze ruffled his feathers as he bent his long bill into the rich mud of Main Pond. I found him there on the western shore, bobbing his head rapidly in and out of the water as he used his long, sensitive bill to hunt for larvae and crustaceans.

He looked up at me when I slowly and carefully opened my camp stool and sat down to watch. The Mallards floating nearby scarcely bothered to turn their heads. They know people are no threat to them here, and somehow their peacefulness reassured the dowitcher. He studied me for a minute, then went back to stitching the mud. He had miles to go on his way south, but for now, there were critters to eat and safety among the ducks. If you’re a dowitcher on migration in July, that’s all you need. Life is good.

One of the sounds I love best about summer is the tootling of the House Finches.

House Finches are the quintessential LLB (little brown bird). The females and juveniles are a nondescript combo of muted brown and beige stripes that allows them to simply vanish from view whenever they hop onto an equally brown and beige branch. The males have a little red here and there, but somehow it all blends into the browns and disappears from notice.

I’ve sat in front of blackberry bushes knowing a House Finch was mere feet from my face, and yet I couldn’t pick it out from the foliage. Other times, I’ve seen one or two in a bush, and then they get startled by something, and a bazillion fly out, like clowns exiting the Clown Car at a circus. They were obviously perching in plain sight all the time, but their nondescription hid them like magic.

What the House Finches lack in appearance, though, they make up for in song. House Finches have one of the most complex, beautiful songs in all of bird-dom. In spring, the males give concerts that go on and on, never seeming to repeat themselves. Not tuneful, exactly, since I can never quite identify a pattern; more like an improvised operatic run, when the tenor takes one note from the score and won’t let go of the spotlight for long minutes at a time.

Now that it’s summer, the males have mostly stopped singing. Instead, they and their families are tootling. It’s a musical conversation they carry on with each other, and it is lovely. I guess they just can’t help singing, even when they’re only passing idle comments.

It’s this trait of House Finches that appeals to me the most because it reminds me it’s what you do in life that matters, not what you look like.

Some say the Yellow Warbler is our yellowest songbird. It may very well be true. Yellow Warblers are bright yellow from head to claw. When I say “bright,” I mean they may rival the sun itself in measurable lumens – although I must admit that really isn’t hard to do in the gray skies of our typical Junuary. A day-old corn muffin could rival the sun at this time of year. But I digress.

When a male Yellow Warbler shows up in his newly donned spring plumage, you can see his flash of sunshine from a quarter-mile away. Every square inch of him is yellow, except for a few black wing feathers, and some red breast streaks that look like rays at sunrise.

The ancient Egyptians often depicted the Aten – the sun god – as a disk emitting rays with little hands at the end of each ray. The hands patted the upraised faces of worshippers, blessing them with the gift of life. That’s what a Yellow Warbler is to me – a blessing of life itself. Seeing one always makes me happy.

Don’t get me wrong. We have other yellow birds at the Fill, of course, and I’m very fond of them, too. One of the brightest is our state bird, the American Goldfinch. But if you look closely at a goldfinch’s feathers, you can see that underneath the yellow lie white feathers, kind of like a guy wearing a lemon Armani shirt over a Jockey tee. The Yellow Warbler, by contrast, is yellow through and through.

Yellow Warblers come to the Fill during spring and fall migration. It’s rare for any to nest here, but I think we are hosting a nesting pair this year. I found a singing male in the willows near Southwest Pond this week, and I suspect he’s defending his mate’s nest by doing what warblers do best: singing.

This one, however, was not looking great. His yellow was worn and frayed. He was busy hunting for bugs and barely had time to toss off a snatch of song. He would hop onto one branch, sing a little, look for predators, hop to the next branch, do a quick preen, search for an insect, hop, sing. The poor thing looked exhausted.

I know intellectually he was probably just molting his feathers, and that’s why he was looking a little dull. I also know scientifically he was merely following his genetic imperative to breed. But to my eyes, he had worn himself wan, spending his life force in the service of his family. A shining example to us all.

Belted Kingfishers were born to kvetch. They can’t seem to go anywhere or do anything without a running commentary, pitched loud, raucous, and endless. My favorite female kingfisher, for example, never flies silently. Yesterday, she was flapping around Paulson Prairie kvetching with every flap. Last autumn, we found her perched in a snag at East Point. Every few seconds, she would raise her tail and make a comment. The tail-raising seemed to fan her temper.

I love that little gal. Kvetching, you see – contrary to what the online dictionaries say – is not ordinary complaining. It is complaining raised to an art form. In the military, they call it griping. Among the English upper crust, I believe it is called grousing.

Kvetching is not meant to be taken seriously. In fact the word “kvetch” is a Yiddish word derived from the German for “squeeze.” Think of squeezing a toy and hearing a kind of eep-y protest. Kvetching is like that. No one – least of all the kvetcher – expects the listener to do anything to make a squeeze toy’s life better. We can thus just stand back and admire.

As  I  did  last  year when my favorite female flew into the dead willow snag at the north end of Main Pond. There she stood, kvetching continuously as she studied the water below, looking for a fish. Unfortunately, a Cooper’s Hawk was drawn to the sound of her voice and came rocketing in. With one especially loud squawk, the kingfisher sprang into the air and flew around and around the pond, keeping just barely out of reach of the hawk. Kvetching all the while. Then in a virtuoso display of flying technique, she executed a loop-the-loop and got behind the hawk. Instead of flying off safely, though, she went after the hawk, pecking him in the behind with her powerful beak. Kvetching all the while. The hawk, completely cowed by this attack, fled, leaving behind one feather that floated gently down to land on the water. The kingfisher returned to her perch, fluffed out her own feathers, and settled down to hunt for fish again. Kvetching all the while.

In other words, she shook off a life-threatening attack that would have prostrated you and me for days. “Hawks? Nu? What do I care for hawks? Let me tell you about something really important. The supply of fish. The placement of this snag. Those geese that get in my way when I try to dive. The birders with their binocs, watching, watching, always watching. What’s with that? My lumbago….”

You can’t help loving a soul like that.

I’ve been hearing a lot of muttering at the mud puddle that leaks out of Southwest Pond and covers a portion of the Loop Trail, like a watery boulder in the path of life. Runners come to it and start dancing up and down in place as they contemplate how wet and dirty their expensive running shoes will become if they splash through, versus what would happen if they follow the newly trodden path through the grassland above the trail. Unfortunately, they soon realize the new trail is also unbelievably wet and muddy. That’s when they start to mutter.

Birders are just as chary of the mud. “Did you get through?” they often ask me as I round the Loop Trail, much as the royal heads of Europe must have asked their hired explorers after they tried to find the Northwest Passage. A mix of hope and curiosity.

One day, as I approached the Great Barrier Puddle, I saw that someone had placed a stick in it as a kind of wooden steppingstone. It didn’t last. Numerous feet soon trod it deeper and deeper into the depths of the puddle, until it disappeared from view. It’s probably still down there, waiting to burst forth again like Atlantis rising from the sea, if and when our summer ever dries out.

What is irritating to us, however, is essential to the birds. Barn Swallows and Cliff Swallows come here to gather mud for their nests. A Common Yellowthroat sometimes lands near the edge to hunt for insects. Yesterday, a Virginia Rail slowly slinked out of its marshy blind and poked about for crustaceans. I think it got a little snail. Every now and then, the Cinnamon Teal pair who live in the pond stand in the puddle just deep enough to cover their feet. Why do they do this? I can’t say. We humans don’t always know why a bird does something. We just have to know that it’s up to us to provide enough good habitat for them to do what they need to survive. Even if it comes at an irritating cost to us.

Great Blue Herons often look to me like they just stuck a toe in an electric socket. Foom! and their feathers jut out in shock. Other times, they remind me of Emperor Joseph II’s criticism of Mozart’s new opera. To paraphrase: “There are simply too many feathers. Just cut a few and it will be perfect.”

But as Mozart was completely unable to cut a note without ruining the perfection of his opera, a heron needs every one of its feathers, too, raggedy or not. Some it needs to keep warm. Some it hopes will attract a mate. Some it uses to intimidate a rival. Some are to fly, some to steer. Some smooth out the contours of the heron’s wings to improve air flow. All these feathers are piled onto the bird – in rows, in stacks, in heaps, in single plumes. There are so many you could never hope to count them all.

The feathers take a lot of care. They must be oiled and smoothed, fluffed up and patted down. Sometimes, the feathers itch, and the heron must raise one foot in a careful balancing act and scratch the offending area. Sometimes, the feathers wear out, and then the bird must molt.

All birds molt their feathers, usually at least once a year, but they do it on their own schedule. Some birds molt just before they leave to head south on their long flight to their winter territory. Some wait till they’re home for the winter and then molt. Some molt soon after the babies leave the nest, when the parents have time to draw a breath. Many males, especially ducks, molt out of their breeding plumage shortly after mating – they need to get inconspicuous as quickly as possible to evade predators.

Herons never seem to molt. On the contrary, they always seem to carry an overabundance of supply. Intellectually, you know they must lose a feather here and there, now and then. But like all the best performers, they never let you see them drop a note.

It must be hard to be a woodpecker. For one thing, all that head-banging can’t be good for your brains. More to the point, how does one even go about finding the right piece of wood to bang your head against? The number of trees and snags in the Fill is large. They can’t all have insects under their bark.

Luckily this past week, the Downy Woodpecker family that has been nesting in the cottonwoods at Boy Scout Pond all spring put on a demo on just this topic. I was privileged to be in the audience. Here’s how it’s done.

First, mom came roller-coasting out of the woods and landed in a dead snag bordering the marsh. She began banging away at the wood. Soon junior came bouncing out to join her, followed by dad, whose little red topknot gleamed in the weak sunlight. Junior watched intently as mom pecked vigorously on the trunk of the snag. Her bill moved so fast it was impossible to see the motion distinctly – only a blur showed in my binoculars. She stopped a few times, as if encouraging her little one to try. But junior was clueless. So dad tried his beak at the lesson. He flew to another tree and waited till the family positioned themselves on the tree. Then, WHANG WHANG WHANG.

It is said that woodpeckers can detect their larval prey through sound. I find this hard to believe, given the noisiness of the Fill – the constant whooshing of traffic across the bridge, the drone of the Laurelhurst neighbor’s pontoon plane taking off, the shouts of the crew coaches spurring their kids on to greater effort. There is always a lot of noise pollution in the city. How can you hope to hear a sound as tiny as that of a grub inching its way inside the wood of a tree?

But my husband, the physicist, has no trouble believing this tale. “When I was a paperboy in Iowa,” he said, “I could always sense when one of my customers was hiding in the closet so he wouldn’t have to pay me when I came around to collect for delivering his newspapers. I would knock against the door and listen for a body taking up space in the room, just like a carpenter knocks against a wall and listens for a stud. If that didn’t work, I would knock again and freeze. Somehow, I always knew when my customer was there, standing just behind the door, trying to breathe without a sound. I think I could sense my prey’s vibrations through my feet. A paperboy with sensitive feet can go far in this world.”

I still don’t know if I believe that woodpeckers can hear grubs moving inside wood. But I am willing to concede that beings different from me can have senses I cannot hope to understand.

“Patience on a Rock,” as I have nicknamed the female Pied-billed Grebe who has been patiently sitting on her nest in Southwest Pond since early April (!!!), has brought forth babies. I saw two under her this week. Normally, Pied-billed Grebes take only about three weeks to incubate their eggs, with the mom and dad switching places and covering up the nest with rotting vegetation when they both need a break. But this pair took three months. I suspect the female kept laying nonviable eggs, or perhaps a raccoon snuck in there and put in a couple of whitish rocks as a joke. (Raccoons are known for their jolly sense of humor, as anyone who has confronted one of their spilled-garbage pranks in the early morning when you’re late for work will attest.) Now that the babies have hatched, we can expect to see them riding on their mother’s back as she takes them around the pond for an outing.

Look for the babies’ zebra-striped heads peeking out of their mom’s warm feathers. You should also listen for the kids’ little peeps when they get hungry and beg for food. The parents will be frantically catching fish to stuff into the babies’ beaks for the next several weeks. No more time to sit there and brood, letting the days drift by. As tempting as it is to just incubate, life demands more from us than that.

Cliff Swallows at work on Main Pond.

Cliff Swallows always strike me as the blue-collar members of the swallow clan, that is if swallows wore collars. What I mean is, they are a hard-working, beak-to-the-grindstone kind of bird. While their more hey-go-mad cousins the Tree Swallows wait for a handy woodpecker to dig a hole in a tree for them to use as a nest, the Cliff Swallows make their own. It isn’t easy for them, either. They must gather mud by the tiny beakful, mix it to proper consistency, and carry it back to a flat surface, where they plaster it onto hundreds of other beakfuls of mud, making colonies of nests in row upon row.

Seeing them toil at the mudbank of the Main Pond, like Israelites making bricks for Pharaoh, does not give the impression that Cliff Swallows believe in partying till you drop. So it was with jaw-dropping wonder that I watched one Cliff Swallow the other day break off from his laboring brethren, float up into the ether, and commence executing barrel rolls that would have put the Red Baron to shame. With a casual dip of one wing, he tossed off a roll, flapped a little to gain air-speed, tossed off another roll, squeaked to the chain gang below, and then did it all again.

There is an age when the strong vitality of youth produces such exuberance that you simply must run, or dance, or do a barrel roll.

Has that vitality passed from us baby-boomers? Absolutely not! We may have reached the age when we can’t get up or down without making a noise. We may think twice before bending down to pick up something, and then when we’re down there think about what else we can do before we straighten up again. But inside, we are still eighteen. And inside is where it counts.

A Willow Flycatcher has been singing his love song from the swamp south of the CUH building lately. I wonder if he’s the same flycatcher who sang every summer morning from the top of the dead willow snag on the north end of Main Pond. He may very well be – birds often do come back to their same breeding grounds. One male Willow Flycatcher returned to its Oregon territory every year for eleven years.

Willow Flycatchers belong to the Empidonax family. There are eleven different species of Empidonax that come to the US from Central and South America to breed every summer. The distinguishing characteristic of  Empidonax flycatchers is that there is no distinguishing characteristic. They all look alike: brownish to olive backs, grayish to yellowish fronts, a couple of whitish wingbars, whiskers around the beak. Not a peacocky family. In fact, they’re all what we birders call LBBs – little brown birds (or, if you’re from Texas, LBJs – little brown jobs).

Oh, you can see minor differences in eye-rings, yellow wash on the belly, bill length, tail length, and such. But the truth is, the only way to tell one fly-catcher from another is to hear its song.

That’s what I loved so much about my favorite Willow Flycatcher of last year: his song. He would fly up to the topmost branch of the tree and wait while the House Finches amassed there to sing their own liquid, complex melodies. The finch songs would go on and on while the Willow waited in the wings, so to speak. Finally, the finches would pause, and the flycatcher would swell himself up like Pavarotti . His little neck would bulge, his beak would point itself up to the heavens, and forth would pour the little singer’s aria: “FITZ-bew! FITZ-bew! FITZ-bew!”

I have to say the Willow’s song is one of the least melodious in all the bird kingdom. Many people would scarcely classify it as song at all. More the crankcase than the trumpet. But to the singer, his music was sublime.

It’s a lesson for all us seemingly untalented talents. To an outside ear, our song may not qualify us to appear on stage, but it is uniquely ours. No one else can sing it as we do. No one else ever has or ever will. Therefore, sing it loud and sing it proud. It is beautiful.