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.

After two exciting days at a couple of the hottest spots around, I decided to duck the binocular-brandishing crowd today and try someplace new. I didn’t exactly close my eyes and point at the map, but I did settle on a green blotch in the atlas I’d never heard of, and so set off for Nutley’s Memorial Parkway.

It turned out to be exactly what I’d hoped for: a nice strip of trees and bushes along an urban watercourse, and I had it all to myself until the earliest of the dog walkers and the promptest of the morning joggers showed up. And there were birds: half a dozen species of warblers, both eastern orioles, and my first Swainson’s Thrush of the spring. I was impressed to see a pair of Northern Rough-winged Swallows investigating a mossy cavern in the bank of the creek.

Of all the new things I saw, this is the one that brought me up short.

Look at that last name listed among the Trustees. I was birding hallowed ground.

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.

Have you ever arrived at the start of a birding trip only to spend the next six hours in the van, waiting, waiting, waiting for the thing to finally begin? It’s not that way in New Jersey. The early arrivals and I met up Thursday afternoon at Newark Airport–the very antithesis of the natural–and five minutes later we were birding the gently wooded shores of Weequahic Lake, tucked into Newark’s largest and most beautiful city park. Our first bird was a Mute Swan on the nest, and as we walked through the open woods, we enjoyed great views of Blue-gray Gnatcatchers, Black-and-white and Myrtle Warblers, White-throated and Chipping Sparrows, and the other common migrants of a mid-Atlantic spring. It was a lovely warm evening, and we found it difficult to believe that we were still within sight of the airport control tower.

After a couple of hours, we picked up the rest of our congenial group and set off for the Pine Barrens, where we checked in to our hotel and had our first meal together, in a genuine New Jersey diner. The night was a short one and the next morning early, but spirits were high and eyes mostly open by the time we got to Belleplain State Forest, one of the true jewels in the crown of south Jersey birding.

The voice of the woods was the loud chant of innumerable Ovenbirds, one of which finally gave us fantastic scope views as it sang above our heads. A Pine Warbler fed on the road right under our van windows, and Black-and-white Warblers squeaked and creaked everywhere we went. The undisputed highlight of the morning came as we were driving out of the forest, when a Broad-winged Hawk swooped low across the road to land on a nearby branch, where it was joined by another–and the pair proceeded to copulate before our eyes. We’d expected to see that species, but the behavior was one none of us had witnessed before.

After lunch we drove the short distance to Jake’s Landing, a vast expanse of salt marsh on the Delaware Bayshore. Ospreys were everywhere on the nest platforms scattered through the marshes, and a female Northern Harrier was probably one of the sadly few breeding birds of that species left in the state. Buzzing Seaside Sparrows posed for scope views and photographs, and we even got to see two of the many Clapper Rails grunting and rattling out in the spartina. Hands-down winners in the competition to be named Most Graceful were the Forster’s Terns fishing in the channels.

A brief stop at CMBO’s Goshen center produced our first Eastern Bluebirds of the weekend and the first Orchard Oriole of the year, a fine chestnut male singing his jangling warble from the bushes. The newly arrived Barn Swallows dancing around the parking lot were joined by a single Northern Rough-winged Swallow, strangely the only one we would see for the entire trip.

The beaches and sandbars at Villas were covered with Laughing Gulls, Forster’s Terns, and Dunlin–but the parking lot was covered with gnats, all of them annoying and a few of them hungry. We held out for a little while, then sought the breezes of the ocean beach at Stone Harbor. We paused along the way on Nummy Island, finding a nice selection of migrant shorebirds including numbers of Black-bellied Plover and Whimbrels. Two Tricolored Herons were a good find, too; this species has greatly declined in New Jersey since the abandonment twenty years ago of the large heronry in Stone Harbor.

The beach itself was cool, breezy, and bug-free, but not overly birdy. A scan of the ocean turned up five Northern Gannets moving north, a small foretaste of the great flight we would observe a couple of days later. As we pulled out of the parking lot, a Brown Thrasher struck up his song.

Already we’d established a routine: Dinner. Sleep. Up early.

We started Saturday at Brigantine. Tempting as it might have been to hit the eight-mile dike drive, we spent the first three hours of the day walking through the piney woods in search of passerines. House Wrens and Gray Catbirds were singing here and there, and we had excellent looks at Yellow Warblers; a single Eastern Kingbird was on the early side. By far the most abundant migrants among the songbirds were White-throated and Chipping Sparrows, some of the latter no doubt newly arrived local breeders.

The birding was even better out among the marshes and pools. Noisy, flashy Willets were everywhere, and the abundant Great and Snowy Egrets were accompanied by a couple of lovely adult Little Blue Herons.

There were a few wintering birds still around–four or five sad-looking Snow Geese, large numbers of American Black Ducks and flocks of Atlantic Brant still taking it easy in the south–but a couple of Caspian Terns and a flock of Whimbrels were yet more signs that spring really is here. Overhead there was a steady stream of Double-crested Cormorants, thousands flying north in sharp-tipped V’s; Common Loons passed over in ones and twos. Brig is always good for raptors, and besides the abundant Ospreys on nests, we also found two Bald Eagles and a very handsome adult Peregrine Falcon.

It’s tempting to spend the entire day at Brigantine, but after lunch we decided to head out to the Tuckerton marshes instead. The massive cormorant flight continued, and a leisurely walk along Great Bay Boulevard turned up a few migrant passerines. A Slate-colored Junco keeping company with a fine Yellow Palm Warbler was out of place and a little tardy so far south in the state. But the abundant Boat-tailed Grackles stole the show, rattling and buzzing from the trees and bushes and wires.

Boat-tailed Grackle at Stone Harbor in March.

The weather had been good our first days, but Sunday dawned cool, windy, and damp.

Our fears that migration had been shut down overnight were immediately assuaged when we arrived at Sandy Hook to find the sky above the surf filled with northing Northern Gannets, hundreds of them powering their way to the Gaspe against the wind. The bay was filled with Brant and gulls, and American Oystercatchers piped past us as they worked the sandbars. There were good numbers of horseshoe crabs ashore on the bay side; while the Laughing Gulls in attendance seemed to be looking for eggs, the Great Black-backed Gulls took a more direct approach, eating the upside-down adults on the sand.

The strong winds had more of an effect on passerines. A few brave Seaside Sparrows still climbed up into the bushes to sing, and we glimpsed a couple of Swamp Sparrows around the edges of the marsh, but it wasn’t until we got into the protection of the holly forest that migrants began to appear.

Another Yellow Palm Warbler gave us great views as it fed on the roadside, and an assemblage of at least six Hermit Thrushes was plucking hackberries from the trees. Four Cedar Waxwings stopped in briefly, and a Purple Finch sang from high up in the leaves; he remained invisible, frustratingly, but a couple of House Wrens, on the heard-only list up to then, finally let us see them. Out on the leeward side of the dunes, large numbers of White-throated Sparrows and Myrtle Warblers were joined by a couple of Field Sparrows, a natty White-crowned Sparrow, and a White-eyed Vireo.

The promised rain had held off nicely all morning, but it started in earnest just about the same time our stomachs started to growl. We crossed back to the mainland and had a warm lunch overlooking the bay as gulls and cormorants flew past intent on their own. It was pouring by the time we started on our way back north to the airport: our timing couldn’t have been better.

In three and a half days, we’d seen a lot of birds, had a lot of laughs, and learned all about such non-avian Jersey specialties as jug handle turns, Wawa, and vanishing bagel boxes. And I hope everybody else is looking forward to our next adventure as much as I am.

It’s impossible to name a favorite sight or sighting on a day when there was so much around, but the ooh-and-aah meter went off the scale when we witnessed one of those classic encounters between big raptors. There’s an Osprey pole in the marsh, and as we watched, one of the birds flew in with a smallish fish in its prickly talons–only to be divebombed out of what seemed like nowhere by a nearly adult Bald Eagle. The aerobatics were awesome, but the fishhawk soon gave up, dropping its prey onto the mud and flying away. The eagle came in to claim its prize, only to be savagely attacked by a second, younger, and noticeably larger Bald Eagle that rose from the mucky ground where it had apparently been waiting. As those two wrangled in the sky, two Ospreys, presumably the pair in original possession, climbed high into the sky and began to stoop on the big birds, flashing their white underparts as they twisted and fell. A third Osprey joined in, so that we had five big raptors tussling over one little fish in front of us.

I’d certainly never seen an encounter so dramatic between those two species, and I don’t think anyone else in our party had, either. The only problem: the experience sets an impossibly high standard for the next course!

It’s that in-between time, when early arrivals like Winter Wrens, Pine and Palm Warblers, Eastern Phoebes, Yellow-bellied Sapsuckers, and Ruby-crowned and Golden-crowned Kinglets fill the woods. It’s lasted a bit longer than usual this year, with the warm weather of March luring the short-distance migrants north–and now the strong winds of April keeping much of anything else from drifting in. But the instant the breezes switch to the south, we’ll be in the thick of it. Can’t wait!

Eurasian Collared-Dove, Cape May, NJ.

My new ’state bird’ Saturday. A great weekend (otherwise!) in south Jersey.

To think that this beautiful little creature was probably still in Florida twenty-four hours ago!