Spirits are lifting as spring weather approaches, promising warm days filled with nodding flowers, floating butterflies and leafed-out trees.
If we could trade places with a bird, however, we'd discover a very different view of this preseason. Instead of this being a good time in the bird world, it's a very lean season filled with scarcity and hunger. Birds now are spending their days scrambling in search of scarce food, heading into night roosts having consumed barely enough calories to make it through until morning.
Overwintering birds spent the past six months scouring the neighborhood for seeds, fruit or insects so intensively that there's very little left. For example, the rain gardens in my neighborhood are rife with seed-bearing plants, but the goldfinches and house finches had plucked all the seeds from the monarda, goldenrod and coneflower heads by mid-February.
The local chickadees seldom stop at our big maple on their daily foraging route to probe its bark crevices for spider eggs and insect larvae — they know these are pretty much picked clean.
And the robins that swirled from place to place during the winter have consumed all the crabapples and winterberries and now have turned to low-nutrition fruits like those on staghorn sumac.
Mother Nature's cupboard is almost bare but birds still need to eat just as frequently, to ward off the cold and begin the high-energy tasks of courtship and holding a territory. New crops of seed, fruit and insects won't be available for months.
What's a bird to do?
This is the time of year when our landscapes can help make a difference for birds on good days and bad, increasing the chances they'll be around to greet the spring.