Teddy Roosevelt would not have approved of Virginia Rails. For one thing, they speak loudly  — so loudly, in fact, that if you’re sitting on your camp stool within a meter or two of a Virginia Rail when it lets loose a cry, it will blow your hair back.

A second reason our bully president would have disliked Virginia Rails is that they fail to carry big sticks. In fact, rails are without defensive weaponry of any kind. To avoid predators, they must skulk and hide in the reeds and cattails of their marshy homes.

But yesterday I met a rail whom even Teddy could love. I was sitting on my camp stool at the edge of Main Pond, watching the clouds and the ducks drift by, absorbing the peace that the Fill grants so profligately. Suddenly, a Virginia Rail a few feet away gave a tremendous screech, causing me to set a world’s record in the sitting broad jump.

When I had come back down to roost, I saw a tiny, reddish-brown body poised at the edge of a bush. The rail was glaring at me. Or at least, it seemed to. With rails it’s hard to tell. They have a white eyebrow immediately above their eye, and black feathers below, giving them a dyspeptic look, like an old curmudgeon about to raise his fist and yell, “You kids get off my lawn!”

In this case, the rail clearly did want me to get off its lawn. It was carrying a worm that it meant to give to its baby, who must have been waiting in the bushes on the other side of the clearing. I was right in the middle of the path, blocking the way.

As I wondered how it would get around this boulder in its life, it came running out a few steps, changed its mind, and dashed back into cover. Then it tried sneaking out slowly, but when it saw I was watching, back it went into the bush. Next, it gave another ear-piercing screech. When that failed to remove this obstacle that was me, it screwed up all its courage and marched across the clearing, holding tightly onto its worm. Before it disappeared into cover again, it gave me one last look. I got the message and got off its lawn. Courage and curmudgeonliness  like that deserve our respect.

One of the regular joggers at the Fill asks me every morning, “Anything good here today?” He never stops running, so I have to shout out my answer.

“There was an eagle that caught a coot,” I’ll yell, or, “I saw a Red-tailed Hawk catch a whacking big rat today.”

“Awesome,” he’ll pant as he disappears down the trail. He likes his birds to be big and preferably predacious. The lbb’s (little brown birds) don’t hold much interest for him.

I looked up the word awesome today.  The Oxford dictionary defines it as full of “a feeling of reverential respect mixed with fear and wonder.”

I have a lot of respect for raptors of all kinds, but the birds that truly inspire awe in me are the little ones that my jogging acquaintance runs right past. There’s just something about how small and yet how indomitable they are that appeals to my spirit: the Rufous Hummingbird that can speed like a bullet and stop instantly in front of a nectar-filled flower; the Bushtit that is barely the size of a golfball and weaves a nest the size of Shaquile O’Neil’s sock; the Yellow Warbler who looks like a fluffy Easter peep and has the strength to fly all the way to Central America. These are the birds that make me stop in my tracks.

Yesterday, for example, the truly awesome birds at the Fill were six Black Swifts who appeared out of the misty mountains in the east like an arsenal of black scimitars cutting through the clouds.

Black Swifts nest behind waterfalls, no one knows exactly where. They spend the winter in the far south, but we’re not sure exactly how far south. They are creatures of the wind, hunting in the sky, mating on the fly. On cloudy days in June, they wing their way from the Cascades to the lowlands to eat a few insects and then return to their mysterious haunts.

When one broke off from the flock to hover right over my head, mastering the wind somehow without flapping, wings outstretched, hanging still in the air like the angel who tops the Christmas tree, my heart stopped, my ears heard only the wind, my mouth fell open. A feeling of wonder crept over me. Awe.

The two baby Killdeers who recently hatched at the Fill have already left their nest — a scrape in the gravel of the Dime Parking Lot  — and have begun foraging for themselves under the watchful eyes of their parents. You can see them running on their long legs amid the short grass that borders the gravel. They look like fuzzballs on stilts as they dart here and there searching for bugs and worms to eat.

Killdeers are precocial birds, meaning, the babies are born with the ability to move around and fend for themselves almost immediately after hatching. That’s not to say that they can dispense with their parents, however. On the contrary, baby Killdeers depend on their parents to show them the best spots to find food. The babies also rely on their parents to help ward off danger. Crows are always on the lookout for unwary younglings, and the Raccoons and Coyotes who hunt by night wouldn’t say no to a tasty Killdeer either. It’s a chancy world.

Parent Killdeers can’t really do much to fight off predators. They don’t have the proper equipment. They lack sharp talons and fierce beaks and don’t carry any permits for concealed weapons. Outside of freezing into a statue and hoping their browns, blacks, whites, and beiges will conceal them from predators’ eyes, Killdeer adults have only one mechanism to protect their young: They pretend to be injured themselves.

The parents at the Dime Lot are especially skilled at this. If they think I’m going to threaten their young, one of them will stick out a wing or a tail and drag it along brokenly on the ground, crying piteously to attract my attention. If I follow the “wounded” bird, it manages to stumble ahead just fast enough to keep from getting caught. When it figures it has drawn me far enough away, it leaps into the air, giving its characteristic “kill-EER, kill-EEER” laugh and flounces off, leaving me feeling foolish. “What a chump,” I can almost hear it thinking.

I am glad to let it think so. I’m a parent, too, and I sympathize with the birds’ efforts to keep their kids safe, no matter how much they dart out from cover.

I ran into a birder the other day who was standing near Kern’s Restoration Pond, looking frustrated. “What’s up?” I asked, prepared to hear a dog-off-its-leash story, or something similar.

“I can hear a Common Yellowthroat in there singing, but darned if I can find him,” complained the birder.

I know the feeling. Common Yellowthroat males are among the most beautiful of all our summer warblers. They have sun-bright yellow fronts and a dramatic black mask across their eyes. Imagine a combination of Liberace and Zorro, only downsized to something not much bigger than a golf ball, and you’ll get the picture.

You would think a Common Yellowthroat would be easy to see in this get-up, but the opposite is true. A male can sing literally inches away and yet remain completely hidden. When he finally does move, you realize you’ve been staring in the correct vicinity but have somehow missed the bird.

“Well,” I said, trying to console the birder, “we’re not dolphins, you know. We can’t echo-locate,” and I gave a little ping.

The birder gave me “the Look” and then harrumphed off. Reflecting on the fact that I had always previously thought only women were capable of executing the Look, I sat down on my camp stool and prepared to wait for the Yellowthroat to sing again. Shortly, he did but remained hidden. I scanned the habitat. The bird appeared to be in a patch of leafy bushes that measured only a hundred cubic feet or so, but it was simply impossible to find him.

Then I remembered owls. Owls can’t echo-locate like dophins either. In other words, they can’t bounce a ping off a body the way sonar does and then listen for the return echo. Nevertheless, they can locate prey by sound. They can do it because their ears are asymmetrically positioned on their heads. One ear is higher than another, enabling owls to tell where a sound source such as a scuttling mouse is, based on differences in intensity of sound reaching each ear.

How hard can that be? I wondered. I cupped one hand behind my left ear and tilted my head to the right, maximizing the sound differential. The warbler warbled, and I strained to tell apart the intensities of sound coming to my enhanced ear versus my unadorned ear. “Eh?” I said, just as a jogger ran past.

“I didn’t say anything,” she said, giving me a different kind of Look. Then she saw that I had been talking to the bushes, and  she backed away slowly, keeping me in view. When she judged she had gotten far enough away from the crazy lady who apparently thinks plants have brains, she turned and  passed from my life.

Meanwhile, a flash of yellow informed me the Common Yellowthroat had also passed from my life. “Thanks a lot,” I told his departing form, and so to home. Once again, the Bird Lady had added to her reputation.

One good thing about the cold, rainy weather we’ve endured this spring is the bonanza of bugs hatching out of the swampy landscape that in normal years would be dry land. They’re everywhere. What a cornucopia.

Not that I’m particularly fond of insects. On the contrary, I dislike them—intensely.

In this I differ from my 97-year-old aunt. Her idea about bugs is: There is no ugly or bad animal.

“Not even mosquitoes?” I asked her, thinking to trip her up when she told me this philosophy. I mean, who could love a mosquito?

“Well,” she answered, “I don’t like it when they bite me, but if you took the time and trouble to study them, you would see that even mosquitoes are beautiful.”

Since mosquitoes seem to think of me as the chuck wagon on a cattle drive, I have had plenty of time to study them, both in three dimensions and in two (after I squash them). I freely admit I have yet to find their outer—or inner—beauty. So I guess I have a lot further to go on the path toward enlightenment.

On the other hand, mosquitoes are food for swallows, which is great. And yesterday, the swallows were taking full advantage of the smorgasbord laid out by the bugs at the alder grove.  There must have been a couple hundred Barn, Violet-green, Tree, and Northern Rough-winged Swallows zooming around and around the grove, mostly at ground level. I set up my camp stool in their midst, and thus I became a fixture on their endlessly circling carousel.

Tree Swallow about to crack the sound barrier.

It was a wondrous experience to watch these masters of flight swoop by, scooping up insects, never slowing, never colliding, never minding me. Some came so close, I could have reached out a hand and snatched one out of the air. Many gave me a look and a squeak as they passed. I swear one Tree Swallow flew right under my camp stool, but that could have been my imagination. He was on my right for one instant, and on my left the next, and I never saw him pass by. Perhaps he warped space itself. I would not be surprised.

Yesler Swamp is not a place of grand vistas or wide, sweeping views of nature. It is a place of twisty trails, hemmed in by plants who seem bent on regaining the ground they have lost to vigorous weeding by volunteers. You have to watch your step in here. Tree roots the size of speed bumps zigzag across the path. Cut logs installed as stepping stones are slippery when wet, and they are always wet. It’s dark, too, where the willows weave their spidery branches together overhead. They clack, you know, when the wind blows.

And yet I know of no place in all of Seattle more filled with the intimate beauty of nature. Here, you and the wild are close — nose to nose, as it were. I discovered this yesterday as I was edging my way along the oozy trail. Spring has come late this year, the coldest in Seattle’s recorded history. Birds that would normally have migrated long ago held up somewhere south as long as they could. Now, in mid-May, they are coming in a rush, stacked up at the Fill like airplanes waiting to land at Sea-Tac.

I figured Yesler Swamp would be an irresistible draw for the insectivores: the warblers, vireos, and flycatchers that are my favorites in all the bird kingdom. I set down my camp stool where the north loop emerges into a rare open space, and waited. Within a minute or two, I heard the unmistakable song of a Wilson’s Warbler, singing almost in my ear. Wilson’s Warblers are tiny bundles of sunshine: bright yellow underneath, shaded yellow on the back, topped by a black yarmulke on the head. Who knew there were Orthodox warblers? They’re gorgeous birds, but I have to admit, they don’t have much of a song. It’s more a hurried series of chirps strung together without much variation in note. If you can imagine a klezmer singer doing rap — that’s a Wilson’s Warbler.

Nearby, another bird not noted for operatics was hunting for flies: a Pacific-slope Flycatcher hard at work. Pacific-slope Flycatchers are birds of the shady forest. So nondescript are they as to almost defy identification: brown on the back, grayish in front, a couple of whitish wingbars, a white eye-ring. That’s about it. Their “song” is equally plain: a high-pitched peep/pause/peep-peep/pause/PEEP. This is music?

Maybe not, but it is surely magic. For both these birds have flown all the way from Central America to come to this one spot, in the heart of a big city. Here, they find the seclusion they seek to make new warblers and flycatchers, to continue the cycle of life to the next generation. It is here that they sing their little all, and it is here that they share their lives with those of us willing to stop a moment and listen to the symphony of life all around us.

Yesterday the UW Botanic Gardens staff installed some new condominiums west of the greenhouses near the Center for Urban Horticulture (CUH). Oh, not for people, but for Purple Martins.

Male Purple Martin in flight.

Purple Martins, you see, are our largest swallows, and they have been in decline for a long time. They nest in holes, and they like to live together in a colony. Natural habitat that suits them has vanished from our area, and for a while, so did the martins.

Then about ten years ago, one man — a water quality expert and biologist named Kevin Li — began to install houses for Purple Martins all over Puget Sound. He put up natural gourds for the birds among the pilings near Ray’s Café in Shilshole Bay, at Fort Lawton,  in Edmonds, and many other places. Birders began to see Purple Martins again in the skies over Seattle.

Before he died in a diving accident in 2006, Kevin tried twice to install gourds at the Fill. Both times, the gourds were stolen by vandals. After Kevin’s death, no one tried again.

Until now. A couple months ago, Friends of Yesler Swamp  were brainstorming about how to improve bird habitat in the swamp (the easternmost section of the Fill). Kevin’s efforts were mentioned, and everyone immediately realized: Purple Martins belong here.

Within days, the word went out to the birding community: We need money to buy Purple Martin gourds. Birders responded immediately, donating enough to buy eight state-of-the-art gourds. These gourds are specially designed for Purple Martins. They are molded from real gourds but made of UV-resistant white plastic to resist mold and reflect the hot sun, so baby birds can stay cool inside. The gourds have a little porch for the birds to perch on, and an entrance hole that is ridged so starlings and other pests cannot enter to take over the nest.

In the course of our brainstorming, David Zuckerman of UW Botanic Gardens remembered  seeing an unused cedar log at the Arboretum which could be repurposed to make a perfect stand to hold the gourds. Jerry Gettel of the Friends offered to assemble the gourds when they arrived from the manufacturer, and to make a cedar arm for each one, with cordage to raise and lower the gourds so they can be cleaned when nesting season is over.

Two weeks later, a small group of staffers gathered near the greenhouses to dig a post hole by hand. When it was deep enough, they hefted the 13-foot post with sheer muscle power and lowered it into the hole. Then they hung up the gourds carefully, one by one. We were all thrilled when the pole went up and the gourds started swinging in the breeze. Inside each gourd are clean cedar chips, waiting for a martin passerby to take note and move in.

Our new condos.

All together, we have created a work of art that will, we hope, bring purple martins back to the Fill. No one of us could have achieved this alone. Like everything else at the Fill, this project worked because we all helped, because we all respect nature, and most of all, because we try as best we can to balance the needs of people and wildlife.

Purple Martin mom feeding her babies.

As human beings, we each have within us the power to create much of our own environment, at least the cultural parts. What we choose to create is up to us — as individuals, but also as people working together. I hope when we each make our choices about how to act in both our natural and cultural worlds, that we choose to better our environment and bring out the best in each other.

FUN FACTS ABOUT PURPLE MARTINS

• They catch and eat insects on the fly.

• Native Americans have provided nesting gourds for purple martins for centuries.

• Eastern purple martins like apartment-style houses best; western martins prefer gourds.

• Purple martins like to be around people. They are very gregarious.

• Martins are noisy birds with several different songs and calls. Males have a special song they sing at dawn.

• Males look black in dull light and deep, iridescent purple in bright sunlight.

• Females can lay up to five eggs in one gourd.

• Once eggs are laid, they take only a couple of weeks to hatch. Babies are ready to fly a month after that.

• Purple Martins spend the winter in the Amazon Basin.

• Before they migrate, they get together in large groups and then fly south together.

• Thousands of martins used to sit on the powerlines around Green Lake before their population crashed.

When Dennis Paulson, one of the state’s foremost ornithologists, was asked for advice about how to be a better birder, he offered this chestnut: Look at every bird.

His advice is deceptively simple. Of course you’re going to look at every bird, I muttered to myself. Why else are you out here during the coldest, gloomiest spring Seattle has ever known? Why else did you get up before dawn and put on three layers of clothing, leaving your husband sitting beside the heater dressed in his PJs and drinking one steaming cup of coffee after another?

But Dennis knows what he is talking about. So often when we are out in nature, we may be aware of what is all around us, but we don’t stop and look. Thus, we don’t really see. This is as oddly true of birders as it is for the joggers, dog-walkers, and baby-strollers who march through the Fill rarely stopping to look at anything. Sure, we’re there to look at birds, but birders tend to see birds as shapes, colors, patterns of movement. If we see a flock of 200 Violet-green Swallows swirling over a field, as I have been seeing at the Fill lately, we aren’t going to look at every single individual in the flock. We may stare at the flock for a while, trying to pick out a bird that flies differently or has a different shape or color, but if all the birds look about the same, we pass them by. The same is true if a lot of robins seem to be around. We’ll look at the first couple, maybe, but after that we just say, “Oh, there’s another robin.” And we pass on.

That’s what I almost did yesterday, when what I thought was the bazillionth robin of the day flew out of the scrub around Main Pond and landed in a tree in Boy Scout Pond. I was supremely uninterested. For one thing, I was freezing, and the wind was howling, scaring up innumerable whitecaps on the lake. Not another soul was in sight — everyone’s probably all sitting in front of their heaters drinking coffee, I grumbled. When the robin landed, I gave it a glance and kept walking. But then Dennis’s voice rang in my mind: Look at every bird. Sighing elaborately, I hoisted my binoculars up, and lo and behold, there was a Loggerhead Shrike, its gorgeous gray and white feathers ruffled by the wind, its black mask standing out boldly, even in the dim light.

Loggerhead Shrikes are summer birds of eastern Washington. They fly up from the arid lands of Mexico and California to nest in the sagebrush of our deserts. They are songbirds, but also birds of prey, catching grasshoppers and other small animals with their hooked beaks. They are extremely rare at the Fill: only five have been seen here in the past 115 years. This one was preening unconcernedly in the cottonwood tree, but when it saw me looking, it flew away. I scurried after it, hoping to get another look.

The biting wind hit me with full force when I reached Hunn Meadow West, but I no longer cared, for on top of the little fruit tree in the field was the shrike, perched in full view. I stared, drinking in the beauty of this wild creature, who came with the storm and will not stay. It returned my stare for a moment, lifted its wings, and flitted north, gone as surely as the gray mist blown away by the wind. Only memory remained.

As morning seeped in through the windows. bringing with it another dim, dull day, I drew my winter coat on over a fleece vest and an REI-built thermal shirt, and I sighed. Three layers. Again. The calendar says it is spring, but the La Nina that has parked itself off our shores for months keeps grizzling on and on, sending us one winter storm after another.

It reminds me of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s book, The Long Winter. Well, sort of. Laura’s pioneer family endured a winter so harsh there were three-day blizzards twice a week from October through April. Food was running out, as was fuel. In desperation, the Ingalls family twists wisps of hay to keep the fire going.

One day, as Laura’s hope trickles away, her father announces that the winter cannot defeat them.  “Can’t it, Pa?” Laura asked stupidly.

“No,” said Pa. “It’s got to quit sometime and we don’t. It can’t lick us. We won’t give up.”

Neither should we. As the old folksong says, “There’s a dark and troubled side of life, but there’s a bright and a sunny side, too. Tho’ we meet with the darkness and strife, the sunny side we also may view.”

The earth is tilting its north inexorably toward the sun, and warm days will come. Soon winter must retreat and El Nino will yield to spring.

The birds know it. Yesterday a cyclone of swallows swirled over the Fill. Fifty Violet-greens had arrived from the south and were busy hunting bugs among the clouds. They towered above me, spiraling up and up, as far as the eye could see. Then, at some unseen signal, they swooped down, chittering their gossipy songs as they skimmed along the grass, nearly brushing me with their wings. One decided to light on the birch snag on the shoreline edge of Hunn Meadow West. It perched there only long enough to give me a glance, then, feeling the wind ruffle through its feathers, it spread it wings and was gone.

Dim light?  Gloomy skies? All irrelevant in the glory of the swallows’ kelly-green backs, their glowing violet rumps, their snow-white bellies, and their bright, bright eyes, shining with the force of their spirit, reminding me that life is good and the world is beautiful. And hope lives.

March is a special time at the Fill. For a couple of weeks this month, a little window of time opens, and the songbirds who have spent the winter with us but who breed in the Far North start to sing. They are the avian version of the “snowbirds” who drive their Winnebagos to warm parts in the south to get away from the winter. Fox Sparrows, Golden-crowned and Lincoln’s Sparrows, Ruby-crowned Kinglets, and Yellow-rumped Warblers all seem to think of Seattle as the warm south. In late fall they arrive from their breeding grounds in the boreal forests of Canada and Alaska, and they spend the winter foraging for the abundant seeds and insects the Fill provides.

But as the earth begins to tilt toward spring, the longer days and shorter nights stimulate the hormones of these northern natives. In March, they begin to molt into their breeding plumage — and they lift their voices in glorious song. It is the only time of year we here in the city can hear them.

All their songs are beautiful beyond words, but the most improbably beautiful is the song of the Ruby-crowned Kinglet. It is a rollicking cascade of flute-like music, a solo sung fortissimo, con brio, a blast of pure sound so loud you’d think it comes from a person-sized bird, not the little puffball who truly sings it. By contrast, the song of the Golden-crowned Sparrow is a lament of long, slow notes sung suave, so sweet it can make you weep. These songs are punctuated by the piccolo staccato of the Lincoln’s aria and the wind-rush of the Yellow-rumped Warbler — singers who always seem to be in a hurry to push out all the notes before they run out of breath.

A great place to listen to the concert is on the Loop Trail beside Kern’s Restoration Pond. Here all five soloists often sing together, a quintet that fills the air with angelic music no human can play. Admission is free, but you have to bring your own seating. I recommend a fold-up campstool and a pair of opera glasses, although binoculars will do as well. You need to book your tickets soon, though, because the singers won’t stay much longer. They are already starting to pack for their bags for the big show in the Far North, where the audience is as tough as any dreaded by La Scala opera stars. The females of their species will be waiting to hear what the maestros can do.