Missing out on the dawn chorus

Now that I have cruised well past the half century mark in age, I’ve been taking note – unhappily so – of those activities that remind me that I’m getting older.  I typically avoid wearing socks, for instance, so I don’t have to acknowledge the difficulties of bending over to put them on. And reading in dim light, something I used to pride myself on, is a near impossibility these days.

            Sadly, for the last few years, birdwatching during spring migration – my favorite activity of the year – has also been a reminder that I’m not getting any younger. More accurately, it’s the beautiful warblers, the most treasured of our migrating songbirds, that won’t let me forget that my hearing isn’t what it used to be.

            It started several years ago with blackpoll warblers. They spend the winters in northern South America, and some travel through Rhode Island on their way to breed in the boreal

Blackpoll warbler (Glenn Bartley/Vireo)

forests of Canada and in high elevation forests of northern New England.  The male’s formal black-and-white spring plumage includes a distinctive black cap and white cheek that is suggestive of a chickadee. But his black moustache stripe, two white wing bars, and the black streaks down the side of his white chest make him readily identifiable.

            My problem with blackpolls is that their song is among the highest pitched of all the avian songsters, and I can’t hear them anymore. They sing a rapid buzzy song that sounds a bit like an insect trill.  It’s a song that was hard for me to hear even in my younger days, but today I can’t detect them even when they’re just a few yards away. And since they only stop by our area for a few weeks each May and are typically high in the trees, my inability to detect their songs makes it almost impossible for me to find them.

And blackpolls aren’t the only ones. All of the especially high-pitched singers are dropping off my radar – black-throated green warblers, blue-winged warblers, prairie warblers, pine warblers, blackburnian warblers, worm-eating warblers, black-and-white warblers, northern parulas and more. I used to see and hear all of them around my favorite birding haunts every year in May, but while I still see some of them, I no longer hear them. And that has turned my favorite time of year into a somewhat depressing season.

On a typical spring morning when the warblers are high in the trees and a chorus of other birds are making a delightful racket, I wouldn’t know that most of the warblers were even there were it not for the younger birders pointing out from where the songs are coming. And I hate it when the young kids show me up.

Happily, my eyesight is still spot on and I’m well-practiced at finding the tiny movements of birds hiding among the foliage, so I’m often the first to see the birds that aren’t singing. But that hardly makes up for what I’ve lost.

So this year I invested in a device that transposes the high-pitched songs down to a frequency I can hear, and I’m thrilled to be hearing the warblers again. I am now bombarded by the wonderful dawn chorus that motivates me to get out of bed and start the day with a smile on my face.

I’ve even heard a few blackpoll warblers already this spring. And their buzzy little song was as beautiful as a symphony.

This article first appeared in the Independent on May 16, 2019.