Birds can be found during dog days of summer

You can still find birds in August. They're not as noisy and easy to spot as in April or May and during fall's migration. They've found their mates - the goal of the glorious singing they treat us to in spring. In this season, they're training their young ones, demonstrating finding food and venturing farther from nests. They're emerging from a silent stretch during June and July, when crooning can attract predators.

Last weekend, my cousin Martha and I went "car birding." Early mornings, when traffic is light, we drive slowly, creeping really, down Swede Lake Road. We roll to immobile whenever we hear a peep or see some movement. You might find us turning off the engine and sitting in silence, windows rolled down, listening for song from a hidden perch and peering into the brush. Trading speculations on who's singing. An occasional curious neighbor stops and inquires what we're doing, amused.

That morning, we waited in silence for five minutes to glimpse an immature common yellowthroat, a shy warbler in a willow thicket, repeating "wichita, wichita, wichita" and showing us his bright yellow beast and rump.

Often we exit the car and wait, binoculars at the ready. The brushy swamps bordering our roads often harbor bird songs familiar from our morning walks. The least flycatcher, whose song, Martha taught me, is much like a phoebe's. Both belong to the same family. But the phoebe emphasizes the first of her two emphatic syllables, while the flycatcher stresses the last. We heard a sedge wren, whose buzzy metallic call is translated as "chap chap chatatatat" in the Sibley Guide.

In expansive hayfields, we enjoyed the croaking of a family of sandhill cranes. We spotted vultures on a nearby old barn, lined up along the roof ridge. We enjoyed the mimicking sounds of a catbird. Our hardest-won find was an elusive yellow-winged warbler that we found only after a sustained tromp through a wooded area. I arrived home with a couple of wood ticks from that adventure.

Everywhere along our routes, red-winged blackbirds survey their territories from telephone wires. Starlings are predictable near animal farms. Barn swallows swoop across Swede Lake, catching dragonflies, not bothering a solitary paddling loon.

Kingbirds are our most conspicuous newcomers this month. We first spotted them a week ago at Cromwell's Island Lake public landing. Everywhere you go, you see them lofting themselves in pursuit of insects, their squeaky song expressing their joy of flight and capture. You can tell them by their darkly hooded heads and white bordered tails, flashy in flight. A gregarious breed, they are often found in groups.

On an early morning last weekend, I biked South Finn Road from Highway 210 south to County 6 and back. I didn't expect many birds, but was surprised. A bald eagle and broad-winged hawk both lofted skyward when I wheeled around a corner. I've seen them perched competitively there before. A vulture cruised high above the hayfields. Ravens and crows croaked and cawed closer to the ground. Robins paraded on newly mown farmyards. In the woods fronting the fields, I heard a peewee sing her swooping "pee – a – wee." Flickers, abundant in late summer months, searched for berries in the wood margins. You can find them indulging in chokecherries along the Munger bike trail too.

And the birders at our feeders. I expect their ranks to thin out this time of year. But, no. Hummingbirds helicopter onto our four feeders, sometimes swooping down to displace each other. The black sunflower seed feeders, refilled every 48 hours, draw our resident purple finches, goldfinches, chickadees (fewer in number already), hairy and downy woodpeckers, and white- and red-breasted nuthatches. Whether we are washing dishes at our sink or dining at our kitchen table, they entertain us without knowing it. Our resident pileated woodpeckers are still singing for us, from high up in the oaks. Too big for the feeders.

A pair of barred owls nested in our woods beyond our sauna this summer. Noisier in June, you could still hear them when hanging laundry on the line in July, or at dusk, hooting their monotonic "who cooks for you?"

I credit them with the conspicuous absence of squirrels this year, a usual summer pest. And one magic evening earlier this month, well after dark, we emerged from our sauna to hear two hawks calling to each other in the tall trees above, a sharp descending "peeaauu." Invisible, sending a frisson of delight down our spines.

Enjoy our bird residents and visitors while you can. Look forward to the great fall migration, when many spring birds stop over on the way back from the far north.

Ann Markusen is an economist and professor emerita at the University of Minnesota. A Pine Knot board member, she lives in Red Clover Township north of Cromwell with her husband, Rod Walli.