Sure Signs of Spring

If you are a Major League Baseball fan then you will know that the annual spring training season is already in progress — at least for pitchers and catchers.

I used to follow professional sports but have lost interest over the years, although I will admit that I watched Kansas City eke out a field goal win, 38-35, over Philadelphia two Sundays ago, and was very much impressed by New York Yankees outfielder Aaron Judge’s 62 home runs in the 2022 major league season.

But the news I got from my neighbor Ellen Stahl on Valentine’s Day, and from Vicki Bustamante the following day, was equally impressive.

Ellen was walking along Long Pond, south of Sag Harbor, when she came upon a flock of singing red-winged blackbirds. Vicki had been at her hilly home in northeastern Montauk when male redwings came into her yard on Saturday, February 11.

Professional baseball’s spring training start-up in Florida and the redwings of spring — err, winter — seem to go together each year. You don’t see, or hear, one without the other.

Grackles will come by next, then the earliest robins, then the Baltimore orioles, and so on, and so on, until the warbler influx, beginning in mid-May. By then, the major league season is well underway. It formally starts in the first week of April.

I’m 87 and have been present for these two returns since the beginning of World War II in 1941, but professional baseball, and, I imagine, the annual return of the redwings, has been around since before the 20th century got underway.

Of course, it goes without saying that the annual spring bird migration has been going on for centuries. James Audubon and every other early American naturalist witnessed it, as did Eurasian naturalists in the Old World. Yes, more than 10,000 years ago, when the glaciers were beginning to melt back, bird migration, if it occurred at all, must have been radically different.

And, over the years, some southern birds, formerly migratory, became established in our latitude, the Carolina wren being one, the red-bellied woodpecker being another.

It will be very interesting, and perhaps very saddening, to see what happens in the 2000s. As the Northeast continues to heat up and the waters continue to rise in elevation, will southern birds have conquered New York State and New England? And what will happen to all of our winter residents? The so-called “snowbirds” — the buntings, crossbills, grosbeaks, ptarmigans and the like?

Yes, the grand procession north may not last forever. We should take advantage of it while it is still a sight to behold.

And, simultaneously, what will happen to the grand sport of baseball? New sports like pickleball may come along and become as popular as, or even more so than, what are known now as “traditional” sports.

Will redwing males become monogamous the way Canada geese males and swans are? Will female redwings and other avian females become more brightly colored than the males? Darwin asked some of these questions; modern humans will ask others.

You can bet on one thing: I’m not going to be around when species begin to wane and become extinct, or when the redwings stop coming north each spring.