Isn’t it wonderful to have the sun streaming in late in the day while birds are still singing well into the early evening hours? That by itself is a sure sign of spring. Each of us have our own unique markers of the sometimes slow disappearance of winter into the season of light, warmth, and rebirth. Here’s a random few of ours from the past week or so.

One of our favorites is the faint, high-pitched twittering we heard from the car when we rolled down the windows on a cold evening soon after the sun had set. We stepped out to listen more closely, and we heard it: the loud, nasal, buzzy “peent” just after the male American woodock dropped to the ground from his twittering sky dance display. The bird was displaying from the edge of a lawn near a commercial building that had lights conveniently situated such that, through our telescope, we could see and watch this fascinating, plump, short-legged bird and its ultra-long bill as he uttered his loud “peent” calls over and over.

Another patriotic bird (there are at least 20 birds with “American” in their name), the American robin, is now (at least in our neighborhood) in residence in just about every yard. Their breasts seem more orangey, their bills brighter yellow, and the subtle contrast between their darker heads and light brown backs more pleasing to the eye, in spring…or is it just the dreamy eyed tonic of the season?

Speaking of robins in spring, we counted more than 300 in one farm field on one of the cooler days this week. We’ve seen great numbers in such habitats in early spring before. These have to be robins still migrating farther north. It’s easy to forget that they nest all the way to the Arctic, even into Nunavut of Canada. Those farm fields here are not unlike the tundra habitat that some of them will be nesting in later in the season.

The same day that we saw the 300 robins, we stopped by Pleasant Pond in Richmond. The pond (some might call it a lake) was almost completely covered in a thinning but substantial layer of off-white ice. A circle of open water about 400 feet in diameter on the north side of the narrow causeway that crosses the waterway seemed to be moving. It was full of hundreds of ducks, including about a hundred ring-necked ducks, very striking and elegant with their peaked crowns and white stripes on the bill. Among them were some first-of-the year sightings for us: garish wood ducks and jaunty little green-winged teal. A belted kingfisher rattled from the mouth of the nearby stream on the other side while we watched the waterfowl show.

In the backyard, the white-throated sparrow that overwintered is now tuning up his song for his eventual return to somewhere farther north for the summer (over 80% of the species nests in the Boreal Forest biome of Canada). Some mornings we will just hear the clear whistled “Oh Sweet” repeated several times before he finally finishes with a complete “Oh Sweet Canada Canada Canada” (or “Old Same Peabody Peabody Peabody,” whatever your ear prefers to hear).

Other birds are getting more and more territorial in the backyard. Our resident song sparrow is clearly full of hormones. It tried to take on one of the pair of Carolina wrens currently calling our yard home; we discovered that in the dominance hierarchy, Carolina wrens seem to rule. That song sparrow was chased round and round until he (we assume) finally decided to exit the stage for the time being. The next day, we saw what we assume was the same hormone-fueled song sparrow attacking its own image in the car’s side door mirror. This must be the same song sparrow that has been attacking  himself, so to speak, in our car door mirrors for a few years (and of whom we’ve written about before).

These are a few of our personal signs of spring. What are yours?

Jeffrey V. Wells, Ph.D., is a Fellow of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and Vice President of Boreal Conservation for National Audubon. Dr. Wells is one of the nation's leading bird experts and conservation biologists. He is a coauthor of the seminal “Birds of Maine” book and author of the “Birder’s Conservation Handbook.” His grandfather, the late John Chase, was a columnist for the Boothbay Register for many years. Allison Childs Wells, formerly of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, is a senior director at the Natural Resources Council of Maine, a nonprofit membership organization working statewide to protect the nature of Maine. Both are widely published natural history writers and are the authors of the popular books, “Maine’s Favorite Birds” (Down East Books) and “Birds of Aruba, Bonaire, and Curaçao: A Site and Field Guide,” (Cornell University Press).