[EBB Sightings] new voices in the neighborhood

Dear Birding Friends:

As I write these observations, the window next to me is pushed open so I can 
enjoy the ineffable sweetness of a late spring shower as it refreshes the 
garden and soaks into the already-drying soil.  What is it about rain that 
renews a garden in ways that my watering never can?  Is it the way rain 
falls or the chemistry of the rain water itself?

Digressions aside, the last week has brought several new bird voices to my 
neighborhood in the Berkeley Hills.  This morning I heard the wheezy calls 
of pine siskins who must be passing through after being mostly absent this 
winter.  Several lazuli buntings are singing that song which I have to 
relearn each spring. They are singing in the mixed scrub and grassland near 
the top of Strawberry Canyon.  Although I've been hearing the double 
"Pit-it" of the migrating western tanager for more that a week, today I 
heard the male singing.

I always think of late May as the time of the three-sing-alikes -- the
tanagers, robins, and the black-headed grosbeaks in their ascending order of 
robustness.  The tanagers sound the most laid back.  Robins, the true 
egalitarians in where their chose to nest -- in the heart of noisy cities, 
in quiet suburbs, wherever there's a scrap of grass -- sing a song of cheery 
optimism. If one didn't know better, you'd think it was they who brought on 
the dawn with their carolling.  The loudest, overflowing with passion and 
ready to add variations on the theme, has to be the grosbeak.  Coastal 
California streamsides wouldn't be the same without these glorious singers.

Phila Rogers