Biggest Week
Jay Davis
May 11, 2024 info
I want to describe an experience I had at the Biggest Week in American Birding last week.
Let me paint the background.
It's Monday, May 6th, 2024. I am walking on the Magee Marsh Boardwalk just next to Lake Erie in Ohio. The boardwalk winds through wetlands right next to the lake. It's morning, the light and temperature are perfect.
Every direction I look there are people with binoculars up, looking at a bird. I walk a few steps to the next group of people, to see what they are looking at. It's a Chestnut-sided Warbler.
I walk a few more steps, this group of people is watching a normally reclusive Prothonotary Warbler six feet away in plain sight. In fact, it's a pair, one male, one female, and they are going into and out of a cavity in a tree. I watch, aware this is not something I have ever seen in my Southern swamps. Usually I am happy just to hear them.
But this is not what causes me to be barely able to breathe.
It's the aural spectacle that stuns me.
In every direction I hear bird song. I want you to understand what this means to me.
I have studied bird songs for 20 years. With three partners I even created a business where we sold iPods loaded with bird songs (birdJam). This was pre-iPhone, before smart phones & apps.
Just a few weeks ago, I drove to Tallahassee to see my Mom and spent most of the drive down & back, five hours each way, listening, not to music, but to warbler songs over and over. I do this just on the off chance that I will run into one of these warblers and recognize its song. I do this every spring.
But I don't hear very many of these songs. When I do it is a thrill. It touches some part of my soul, connects me with the seasons, with the cycle of life.
But now I am hearing them. All around me. Over and over and over:
Yellow Warbler, Yellow Warbler, Black-and-white Warbler, Yellow Warbler, Chestnut-sided Warbler, Prothonotary Warbler, Yellow, Black-and-white, Prothonotary, Yellow, Yellow, Yellow, shit there's an Indigo Bunting somewhere, Prothonotary, Catbird I'm ignoring you, Common Yellowthroat, a Robin ok, Red-winged Blackbird, Yellow, Chestnut-sided, God another Prothonotary, God a Black-throated Green, is that a Palm?, Chestnut-sided, Yellow, Prothonotary, I think that's an Ember-throated Warbler (Blackburnian Warbler), Northern Parula jeez, I've been ignoring them they are in every direction, Is that a Black-throated Blue?, Yellowthroat, Blackbird, Yellow, Yellow, Yellow Warbler's everywhere. And what's that one I don't know? A Nashville Warbler!
And now a quick word from our sponsor: Yellow Warblers. They are everywhere, singing, singing, singing "Please please please to meet-cha." I literally never hear these birds. Okay, maybe if I go to the little water treatment pond up in Dillard, Georgia, more than two hours away, in the Spring, I might hear one. But I don't know their song very well because I never hear it. I mean, until now.
And I have to say, my bird song recordings are wrong about Yellow Warblers. 90% of the time they say "please please please to meet-cha," not the other variations of songs that my recordings suggest might be as common. And I see why other people from up North know this bird song so well. They sing. A lot.
So I walk slowly, listening, taking it in, blissfully aware that this is a first-in-my-lifetime experience. All this bird song, all these species' songs that I have studied so studiously, all here, all at once, making an aural field that practically overwhelms me, brings tears to my eyes.
And then I have Susan, Isabelle, Delia, Kathi and Beth with me, passing me, then going backward calling me back to see another Prothonotary or a Black-and-white and I think "this would be good without my friends, but wow it's incredible with a group of friends that are helping me see & hear." It brings tears to my eyes now, writing about it.
It's an incredible place, Magee Marsh in the spring. It was everything I had heard it would be. But for me, the aural experience was stunning and beautiful and glorious.