To a large degree, we have lost the sense of season. Most of us spend the majority of our time indoors, in a climate-controlled habitat with artificial light and air-conditioning, wearing sweaters whether it is July or December. We eat grapes year-round, and lemonade is no longer just a summer treat. With a simple stroke of the pen, we can join a gym and jog whenever we want, rain or shine, without getting wet and without actually going anywhere except maybe an inch or two forward or backward on the treadmill.

For the birds, however, seasons are everything. Birds conduct their lives wholly in the outdoors, where weather tells them to huddle or hustle, and where length of day tells them to stay put or fly far.

Now that April has come, our winter residents are quickly replacing their drab plumage with the brilliant colors of spring. Summer residents are arriving each day, already decked out for breeding. And everyone —everyone! — is singing.

Male Yellow-rumped Warbler, about to leave for the northern taiga.

In fact, the first two weeks of April are the most musical time of the year for us at the Fill. The birds who live here year-round are establishing their breeding territory, which the males do by singing. The birds who come here in spring to breed need to attract a mate as rapidly as possible, which the males do by singing. The winter birds who will soon leave us to fly north to their breeding grounds are so revved up by their hormones that the males are behaving like they already are in the Far North, where they fight by singing. I think many of them will fight and sing all the way to Alaska.

Take a moment out of your busy day to stand still anywhere on the Fill’s trails and listen. The concert you hear will last only another week or two before the winter birds depart, the year-round residents settle down to brood eggs, and the summer breeders get busy raising a new family. We will still have song, of course. We have that all year round. But the symphony will never present us with so many diverse voices as we hear right now. Once the symphony disperses, it won’t return for an entire year, and we will have only our memories of this rich sound to sustain us till then.

Yesterday, I saw a flash of yellow on the edge of Yesler Swamp, in a tree covered with last year’s fluffy white seed balls. I’ve been noticing yellow more as the sun has decided to appear again in our cloudy, gray skies. But this was no glint of sunlight. It was an Orange-crowned Warbler, looking bright and newly fledged in breeding plumage.

It was weeks too early for such a warbler to be here, however. In fact, it was weeks too early for me to be out birding in just two layers of thermal clothes. I needed three or four, at least. The wind was howling, the trees were thrashing, and ice had only recently retreated from my windshield. Spring is definitely on the way, but winter is still putting up a fight. It was bitterly cold, and I was huddled in my car with the heater going full blast.

“Ah, that’s our overwintering guy,” I said to Alex MacKenzie, my birder friend who was spreading her hands in front of the car’s heat vent, trying to restore circulation. She had tried to walk the Loop Trail in this winter storm and had made it as far as the Dime Lot, when she saw my car and hustled over to get rescued.

Every now and then, a summer warbler elects to stay in Seattle all winter, instead of migrating south with everyone else. It’s a hard life for an insect-eating bird, especially when relentless rain and snow kill all the insects.

I had first seen this little Orange-crowned toughie back in December, foraging for frozen insects along the fence that borders the western edge of the swamp. Birders have reported seeing him near here for weeks now, but I had not been able to find him again. Now here he was, feisty as ever, the Ernest Shackleton of avians. A survivor.

If any of you out here in the blogosphere would like to come hear me read from my new book, Second Nature: Tales from the Montlake Fill, I’ll be appearing at the next WOS meeting (Center for Urban Horticulture, 3501 NE 41st St., Seattle 98105) on Monday, April 2 at 7 p.m.

I’ll also be at Skagit Audubon’s next meeting (Padilla Bay Interpretative Center, 10441 Bayview-Edison Rd., Mt. Vernon 98273) April 10 at 7 p.m.

I’ll also be giving a reading at The Mountaineers (7700 Sand Point Way NE, Seattle 98115) on April 12, 7 p.m.

The Song Sparrows are tuning up their arias now that spring is here. It’s fun to listen to them rehearse. We have three especially notable soloists at the Fill this year. One practices on the edge of Boy Scout Pond. He pops up whenever I walk by, and gives me a sample of his progress. I always compliment him on his performance, but really, he is pedestrian compared to the virtuoso over at Kern’s Restoration Pond. This guy is good. He starts out with three introductory notes, followed by a series of sharp staccatos, ending with a trill of the sweetest music you will ever hear. I’ve heard him three times now. Whenever he appears on stage (a rose bush branch near the edge of the Loop Trail), he gives it his all, throwing back his head and opening his throat to pour forth his music. When he hits the staccato part, his whole head ratchets rapidly up and down, like a yodeler trying to reach across to the next mountain range.

After listening to his concert one morning this week, I hoped for an encore, but he was done for the day. Disconsolate, I wandered back to Wahkiakum Lane, still trying to hum a snatch of song (as Verde opera attendees were said to do back in the 1800s), only to encounter my third soloist of the day. I arrived in the balcony just in time to see him come onto stage. He fluffed up his feathers, shuffled his feet a little to gain a better stance, threw back his head, and let fly. Whhroowwkk! He sounded exactly like a Whoopie cushion. “That can’t be right,” I said to myself, and shook my head back and forth to get rid of any cottonwool that might have lodged in my ears. The maestro took another breath and, “Whhoooophpht!”

How he expects to get a girl when he’s competing right next door to Plácido Domingo beats me.

Female American Kestrel at the Fill.

She came blasting through the flock of American Goldfinches like a bullet shot through a pillow, birds and feathers scattering in her slipstream. “That’s a kestrel,” I cried, before I stopped to think.

American Kestrels are our smallest raptor: robin-sized bundles of fierceness who hunt for prey as varied as crickets, voles, and small birds. We used to see these tiny falcons at the Fill regularly in August, when our local grasshoppers got big and juicy. But something happened to the grasshoppers years ago. Their numbers plummeted, and the few survivors remaining tended to be small and hard to find. The kestrels stopped coming. I haven’t seen one for years.

Then two years ago, a male showed up. He stayed for only a few days, hunting over Kern’s Restoration Pond, then left, never to return. I guess we’re still not offering a very rich table. So it was a great surprise to see another kestrel this spring.

After that initial view, I have seen this female twice more. Once she perched on top of the Triple Tree (the three-trunked cottonwood in the middle of Hunn Meadow East), flicking her tail and surveying her domain. Yesterday, she floated through the Fill, hovering as kestrels sometimes do when they are looking for prey. This, despite the fact that the wind was whipping Lake Washington into a froth of whitecaps, and nearly every other bird and human had hunkered down wherever we could find cover. Not she, though. She, the little empress of the air, mistress of the wind, wild and free. Oh, what beauty has come to grace our Fill.

The weather was cold and blustery on the day the Violet-green Swallows came back. It was early March. A south wind without an erg of warmth whipped Lake Washington into infinite fractals of pewter-gray waves topped by icy whitecaps. It blew right through all three layers of my clothes — jacket, sweatshirt, and high-tech thermal underwear — like neutrons whizzing unhindered through solid rock. To keep my floppy blue hat from flying away, I had pulled the drawstrings so tightly around my head I was getting a migraine. I knew my forehead would be embossed for hours after I got home and took off my hat.

Enduring the worst of the wind, I trudged along the Loop Trail where it paralleled the lake, wondering why the heck I had bothered to be out here at all when every bird in the known universe had the sense to hunker down. Then a dark shape whirled by, too fast for the eye to follow. I looked up. There against the roiling gray clouds were three Violet-green Swallows, dancing in the wind, dominating the waves, catching insects almost casually.

Spring is here. The swallows have come home.

I laughed in the storm.

When my youngest son was 11, he took me aside one day and said he didn’t want to go on family camping trips anymore. He said he didn’t like getting cold, wet, and dirty in the great outdoors, and he disliked sleeping on the ground. He told me he preferred staying home on weekends, hanging out with his friends. “I guess I’m just a city kind of guy,” he said.

I had to excuse myself to go fix the rib I had cracked trying not to howl with laughter that a kid so young thought of himself as any kind of a guy. I still smile when I think of it.

I suppose that’s why I have become so very fond of the male Barrow’s Goldeneye who has ensconced himself in University Slough for the past several weeks.

Our Barrow's Goldeneye swimming in University Slough.

Normally, Barrow’s Goldeneyes are wild ducks of the mountains and sea. They nest in tree holes and cliff niches in the untamed regions of the north. In Washington, they spend the breeding season in the Cascades or the Okanogan and Methow Valleys. They spend the winter mostly on saltwater. They dislike to be looked at by people and swim or fly away if people get too close.

But not this guy. This Barrow’s Goldeneye has chosen to live in the busiest slough in all of Washington. Every day, hundreds of people walk past him on their way to work at the university. The UW’s cross-country and crew teams run beside him as they train for their next meet. Construction workers who are building the UW’s new track drive up and down the road that parallels the slough, mere feet from the duck. A pile driver has been driving dozens of 60-foot metal pilings into the field a few meters away. In the afternoons, the baseball team works out at the south end of the slough, practicing to the rhythms of rap music played so loudly it can make a grown woman’s eardrums throb a quarter mile away.

Meanwhile, the goldeneye paddles serenely up and down in the oily water, diving for mussels and watching us birders as we watch him. I guess he’s just a city kind of guy.

I’ve always had a special fondness for submariners. Maybe it’s because I remember touring a submarine once with my mother. The sub was here as part of the Navy’s participation in Seafair, and my mom wanted to see all the ships.

The submarine we toured was resting on the surface of the Sound next to a pier, but the main part of the tour wasn’t above water. It was below. When my mother climbed down the ladder into the sub, the young crewmen started giving her wolf whistles because her skirt billowed out. Lord knows how much they saw, but it must have been an eyeful.

Instead of being embarrassed, my mother gave them another flirtatious flip of her skirt and some sexy banter. They roared with appreciation, and so did she. It was the first time I realized my mother was a person, not just a mom. I must have been about ten.

I guess that’s why I always smile whenever I see Common Mergansers fishing at the Fill. They remind me of submarines.

The male doing his business at Yesler Cove today was no exception. He had his head underwater like an upside down periscope, looking for prey. Common Mergansers are visual hunters. When they see a fish, they sound their inner “ba-wooga, ba-wooga,” and dive dive dive, just like all the submarines I used to watch on our little black-and-white TV in the 1950s.

This particular duck was patrolling the entrance to the cove, looking up from time to time to make sure he didn’t bump into traffic. A lot of Mallards and American Wigeons were clogging the mouth of the cove, too. It is a sign of the growing health of Yesler Cove, that both dabblers and divers find enough to eat here. And that thought makes me smile even more.  Humans polluted this cove, but humans are also cleaning it up.

Eventually, the merganser decided to find a less populated place to fish, so revving up his feet like big propellers, he churned the water, flapped his wings, and was gone, leaving behind a big wake and a laughing birder.

FUN FACTS ABOUT COMMON MERGANSERS

• Common Mergansers are our state’s biggest duck. They measure a whopping 28 inches long.

• Males have dark green heads, alabaster white sides, and flaming red bills. Females have rust-colored heads with outrageous mullet-like crests.

• Mergansers’ bills have serrated, tooth-like projections along the sides that help them hold onto the slippery fish they catch.

• Mergansers nest in tree holes or sometimes in rock crevices along rivers in Western Washington and farther north. A day or two after the babies hatch, they tumble out of their holes and walk to the nearest water.

• Parents do not feed their babies, and the babies aren’t very good at catching fish at first. So they subsist on aquatic insects, mollusks, and crustaceans at first.

• Union Bay hosts Common Mergansers throughout the winter, but numbers increase dramatically in spring. We are a famous “staging area,” where multitudes of Common Mergansers gather for several days during migration, feeding in our rich waters and putting on fat for the enormous effort of breeding to come.

On those rare winter days in Seattle when the sun shines, I like to get out to East Point to watch the dawn slowly light up the world. If the horizon is clear, you can see the first tinge of light shine on the top of Mount Rainier, then slide gently down its snowy sides in shades of pink, lavender, and gold until the entire mountain glows with unearthly color. The cold, still air of February presses down on the waters of the bay, smoothing the waves into glass, etched here and there by the ducks paddling by who leave behind only ripples and vees to mark their passage.

Such a morning arrived six days ago, and at 7:00 a.m., there I sat at East Point, drinking in great gulps of glory. As the light grew stronger, my friend Mark Vernon shimmered into view. Mark is famous as the Long Walker birder, a guy who thinks nothing of strolling from Montlake Fill to Volunteer Park, birding his way to heaven without the benefit of car. Mark is a very peaceful, centered kind of guy, the perfect zen-ish sort with whom to share such a morning.

So there we were, watching the ducks float by, watching the sun rise higher, trading stories about birds, when all of a sudden, Mark says I shot up from my stool and began jumping up and down shouting gibberish, of which the only two words he could make out were, “Tufted Duck!”

Tufted Ducks are a kind of mussel-eating, fishing duck from Eurasia. They belong to the scaup family and closely resemble both our own scaup, Greater and Lesser. The males of our native species have black heads and chests, gray backs, and pale flanks.  They always look very tailored to me, like little businessmen dressed for success. I would not be all that surprised to see them someday with a tiny briefcase tucked under a wing, and a heavy schedule of appointments. But the Tufted Duck is different from our own more buttoned-down scaup — he has a streamer of feathers sprouting from his crown and flowing down his neck. Picture a middle-aged rock star with receding hairline and a long mullet preserving his illusion of youth, dressed in a suit because he has to appear in court for some infraction — that’s the human equivalent of a Tufted Duck. A bird with attitude.

Tufted Ducks are rare at the Fill. In the past 117 years, since birding records have been kept, only one has ever been seen here before. Statewide, we’ve had only about 50 since record-keeping began. Tufted Ducks don’t belong here. Their true home is Asia, Europe, and Africa. Whenever a Tufted Duck appears on our shores, it means the bird has wandered far off course.

That’s why, when I glanced down at the scaup paddling serenely past the point, almost within touching distance, and I saw his little tuft arch out like a banner, I literally could not believe my eyes. What I was shouting so incoherently to Mark was, “Oh my goodness, oh my goodness, oh my goodness, a Tufted Duck, oh my goodness.” Because I was stuttering with excitement, it came out sounding like, “OHMAgans, OHMAgans, OHMAgans.”

Mark must have thought I was chanting the latest in yoga meditation, until he realized no yoga acolyte would hop around as vigorously as I was. Then the words “Tufted Duck” smote his ears and he realized it was just a birder finding the greatest bird she ever saw. I think I’m in love.

(The Tufted Duck continues to enthrall his fans. He’s best found in the early morning off East Point, eating his mussel breakfast.)

Cyrano de Bergerac would have understood Northern Shovelers. Cyrano, you may recall, was the swashbuckling hero of Edmond Rostand’s play about true love. He had courage, wit, bravery—and the world’s biggest nose. He also had unbounded love for his gorgeous cousin Roxanne, but he lacked the confidence to tell her so.

When his best friend urged him to tell her of his love, Cyrano answered, “My old friend, look at me, and tell me how much hope remains for me with this protuberance! Oh … now and then I may grow tender, walking alone in the blue cool of evening…. I follow with my eyes where some boy, with a girl upon his arm, passes a patch of silver…and I feel somehow, I wish I had a woman too, walking with little steps under the moon….And then I see the shadow of my profile on the wall!”

Like Cyrano, Northern Shovelers have schnozzolas so immense it’s a wonder they don’t tip right over, nose first, and face plant in the water. Unlike Cyrano, though, they have loads of self-confidence. At least, the male I saw in the Lagoon the other day did. I watched him set eyes on a likely looking damsel sunning herself on a mudbank. Swelling up his chest, he paddled over and began ratcheting his head up and down, swimming back and forth while she watched, mesmerized. He must have been irresistible because she started ratcheting too.

I could see that for her, he was the One. Love at first sight. When another female sidled too close and tried a few head-ratchets of her own, the first female waddled over and gave her rival a ferocious bite. This exhibit of jealousy caused the love-sick male to ratchet so furiously I thought his bill would fly right off.

It’s still early days though—February may be the month for lovers but it’s too cold to lay eggs. So I wasn’t surprised when the male eventually lost interest in Amour and, muttering the equivalent of “Where’s my sandwich?” paddled off to scarf some water plants. From the look in the female’s eye as she watched his rear end disappear in the distance, though, he’s a goner.