[EBB Sightings] new voices in the neighborhood

Just to add to Phila's poetic note (and yes, I know my garden is LOVING this rain), I had a singing Lazuli Bunting (2 males seen) today (before the rain) at Space Sciences Lab across Grizzly Peak Blvd from Tilden Park.  It's always a pleasure to see these gems.

Jaan Lepson
Livermore


>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
>