The woods are full of birds these past damp days, and the air is full of the squeaky jangle of Gray Catbirds.

Listen to that huge flock of birds, I say to myself–and then realize once again that it’s a single catbird singing from deep in the thicket.

Untold millions of Red Admirables have been streaming through New Jersey the past couple of days, and millions of those millions have no doubt fallen prey to happy birds. Saturday at Sandy Hook we saw everything from Barn Swallows to a notably early Olive-sided Flycatcher taking the bright butterflies from the sky.

The star of Saturday's show at Sandy Hook.

The most startling act of predation I saw was committed by a Myrtle Warbler. Yellow-rumps are famously adept flycatchers, of course, but their preferred mode of hunting is the sally and the flutter, flashing out from a twiggy perch to hover for a moment or two. On Saturday, though, I was watching one fly high overhead in that stuttering, darting way they have when the bird spied a butterfly. It changed course immediately and chased the insect down in the air, twisting and turning to put any phoebe or kingbird to shame. The warbler grabbed the butterfly and returned to its aerial path, still holding the relatively huge bug as it entered the woods and flew out of sight.

To judge by the stripped butterfly wings littering the paths, I suspect that that warbler was not the only one taking advantage of the flight.

The Od was out of order at Garret Mountain this morning.

An e-mail came in about 10:15 alerting birders to the presence of a Red-necked Phalarope on Barbour’s Pond–very rare inland in New Jersey, and apparently unprecedented for Garret. It’s only ten mintes from home, so I rode over there and strolled comfortably down to the bottom of the pond, where a small cluster of birders were standing around. I saw no high-fives, no grins, just puzzled faces. Valerie and George greeted me on my arrival and asked if I’d seen the phalarope: I hadn’t, rather to my embarrassment (it should have been unmissable on the open water).

And so they let me look through their scope, where I saw at first nothing, and then the blocky head of a bullfrog with — a long pointed wing sticking out of its grimace of a mouth. The frog had captured the phalarope! The bird was well and truly dead by the time I got there, and I left the scene to look for things alive with feathers instead.

The woodland paths were lively, fortunately, and Least Flycatcher, Eastern Wood-Pewee, Blackburnian Warbler, and Indigo Bunting were “new” for the year for me in New Jersey; says eBird, the Least Flycatcher was my 200th species for the year in the state. It was pleasant birding, the dull light and damp air notwithstanding, but my best sighting was of a birder, a birder looking, puzzled, at the wrong end of his binoculars.

I asked whether he’d identified the culprit.

He hadn’t.

I’m convinced it was a Red-necked Phalarope.

It’s a standard component of birderly small talk: When did you start birding? What got you interested? What was your “spark” bird?

Most of us have developed a standard response: Twelve. A teacher. A Red-winged Blackbird.

But I suspect that for most of us the real answer is complex. For every birder who can name the date and the place and the bird of her awakening, there must be dozens whose beginnings were as lengthy and as gradual as mine.

When we were still tiny children, my father for some reason taught us to look for Red-headed Woodpeckers; that’s a common bird in eastern Nebraska, and I still have dim memories of a couple of those “sightings.” We didn’t feed the birds, but in winter we knew enough to distinguish between the Juncos and the Tree Sparrows on the back porch; how we learned the official names of those birds, which would otherwise have been simply “snowbirds” and “sparrows,” remains a mystery to me. As a fourth grader, I had a teacher, Mrs. Newton–a classmate of my grandmother’s and a teacher of my mother’s–whose duties included instruction in Nebraska history and birds, subjects that she combined so thoroughly that for years I thought that Audubon had been our first territorial governor. She taught us the scientific names of a few avian genera (remember, this was public school in the midwest: how have the mighty fallen!), and regaled us with stories of her favorite birds, the Vesper Sparrow and the Belted Kingfisher. It would be some years before I saw my own Vespers, but once I knew what to look for, great shaggy-crested Belted Kingfishers turned out to actually exist, perching on wires across the Platte River. And of course we knew Blue Jays, the jarring voice of suburban Saturday mornings, and American Robins, eagerly awaited each spring. I remember once seeing two Turkey Vultures over our house, which we promptly and hopefully misidentified as “golden eagles.”

The most dramatic avian scene I witnessed during those pre-birding birding days was an encounter between two Brown Thrashers and a bullsnake. The thrashers–we called them “brown thrushes” as children–were dancing frantically in the grass, one wing raised and bills half-open as they attempted to intimidate the big reptile.

So which one of those, or of the other dozen or so species I must have seen, can count as “first”?

The first bird I actually “birded” came much later, when I was twelve and just after my family had moved to a new house on (what was then still) the edge of town. It was a beautiful May 10, and I’d gone for an after-school walk in the adjacent woods. As I came back out of the trees into the little clearing behind our yard, I spied atop a low tree an amazing black and white creature with a patch of unbelievable red on its front. No binoculars, no bird book, no notebook and pencil: I memorized, with an intellectual effort I can still feel, the bird’s patterns and dashed home and upstairs to (get this) the World Book Encyclopedia. And there in all its Arthur Singer glory was my bird, the splendidly named Rose-breasted Grosbeak. I’d found and identified my own bird, one that I’m sure I hadn’t even suspected of existing before that day.

It was nearly another six months of such casual wonders–an Indigo Bunting singing in the yard, a Bald Eagle over the river, a flotilla of American White Pelicans filling the sky–before I was taken under the generous wings of Alan and Betty and others to actually become a birder; but I knew I wanted to be one with the first glimpse of that bird with the big bill and the astonishing blood-red breast.