What’s the difference between birders east of the Continental Divide and those west of it?  There’s probably a birding joke in there somewhere, but the facts are eastern birders have four distinct seasons and use calendars to gauge their progression, whereas those of us in the west have to use the birds themselves for that.  It could be argued that places like Seattle (rain), California (sun), and Arizona (heat) have only one season, two at most, and this is verified by the observation noted in my early April column of Cactus Wrens mating in January!

So it was last month that birding once again elevated my spirits from dark and dreary to sunny and bright in a way a glance at a calendar can never do.  It was the third week of April as I left for my early morning run along the greenbelt.  The day before it hadn’t just rained, it had poured, figuratively speaking.  The day began when our desktop computer crashed, and it ended with me spending four hours on the phone verbally sparring with a gentleman, whose first language was not English, about why a doctor’s appointment had been cancelled.

I have never claimed to be an “ear birder,” so it should have come as no surprise when I wrote a column several years ago about taking me three nesting seasons to figure out the unfamiliar bird I was hearing on runs before daylight in April.  This April day, though, I was roused from my dark thoughts about computers and the corporate greed of health care conglomerates when I realized I was hearing a now familiar and identifiable bird call.  For sure the dawn “song” of my FOS (first of season), apparently just arrived Western Kingbirds, brought me out of my dark rabbit hole.

Western Kingbirds perform their so-called dawn song, a series of squeaky toy notes with interspersed fast chittering sounds, only before sunrise and never later in the day, so of course I had no visuals.  The reason it took me so long to originally connect these calls to this species was that I rarely bird along the greenbelt in daylight during breeding season.  Stray golf balls and the dearth of anything unexpected to be seen in this well-manicured habitat are my standard excuses.

The sweet spot for the arrival of “my” kingbirds is the third week of April, though I have heard them as early as first week of April with an outlier date one year on March 14.  It is sunlight and habitat conditions on the wintering grounds that dictate their migrations, but hearing their distinctive calls for the first time each year never fails to brighten my mental state.  The sound of them delights me, and the lack of visuals deludes me into thinking I’m an ear birder after all.

Within a week of my kingbird encounter, but way before a new computer had arrived or I had rescheduled the doctor’s appointment, Phoenix recorded its first one hundred degree day of the season.  But . . . so what?  Calendars don’t matter really, because as long as we are in Arizona, Western Kingbirds tell me when it is springtime, seasons, temperatures, and other species’ timelines be damned.

Many Easterners claim swallows or the arrival of the first warblers as the harbingers of spring, but I know they’re watching that calendar.  I never look at a calendar, I don’t care much about swallows, and I know warbler migration in the west is a very protracted event.  I heard my kingbirds and it is springtime.  My kingbirds are not a harbinger of spring.  They are spring.  And, hey, I may not be an ear birder, but my ears always let me know when spring has truly arrived in the desert.