Wild Turkeys were successfully re-introduced to southeast Nebraska 35 years ago. The first birds I saw there were “Merriam’s” Turkey, geographically incorrect with their big white tail tips and white-fringed wing coverts. In recent years, I’ve been happy to see that most of the gobblers one sees slinking away through the woods and terrorizing suburban housepets are now honest-to-goodness “Eastern” Turkeys (or something visually very close to it), the chestnut-tipped race that occurred naturally here until about a hundred years ago.

I don’t generally give them a second look at birdfeeders and on lawns, but turkey encounters deep in the forest are a different thing, an experience of continuity and connection with the birds and birders of a century past. And so I lingered to watch a shy tom on the edge of Fontenelle Forest’s Hidden Lake last Monday.

Shy for only a moment.

A second bird–up to then unseen–dropped heavily out of the trees above me and approached the first, which uttered a few low-pitched chugging notes and spread its tali and drooped its wings as if to strut. The newcomer was insufficiently intimidated, I guess, and with snoods aflame, the two went at each other in physical earnest.

And then something I’d read about and somehow never seen.

The two twined their necks, then braced against each other’s breasts, pushing and straining silently for more than ten minutes.

They broke once for some noisy, nasty fisticuffs, wings beating furiously against the air and, once or twice, against each other.

And then it was back to their rasslin’. Points seemed to be scored by keeping one’s head above the other bird’s during the neck lock.

With all that extra flesh, it was often hard to tell who was winning–or even which wattles belonged to which contestant.

From some angles, it was hard to tell even that there were two birds somewhere in the straining mass of feather and wattle.

Victory is attained, I’m told, only when one bird’s head touches the ground. I never saw this happen–but they were still at it when I left them, nearly half an hour after battle was first joined.

Nebraska, Warbler: Not two words that most birders might think of together, those; but the Missouri River in spring can have some nice warbler days. I was fortunate enough to spend most of Monday out stomping one of the birding grounds I’m fondest of, Fontenelle Forest, and wound up with a dozen parulids for the day. That’s not a bad tally for any site north of Texas the first week of May, and it was particularly exciting to this transplanted southwesterner (imagine: twelve warbler species without Lucy’s or Wilson’s!).

I knew it was going to be a good day when I stepped out of the car on a damp, dim morning to find my ears assaulted by wall-to-wall Northern Parulas. Usually scarce to uncommon as a migrant (and among the rarest of the rare as a breeder), this was the most abundant warbler of the day for me, and I was almost never out of earshot of one or two or five practicing their chromatic scales from the treetops. As a measure of their unwonted abundance, I can say only that I began the morning by looking for them, and soon enough stopped even looking at them, devoting my attention instead to the other birds they shared the lush lowlands with.

Among them: Yellow-throated Warbler. This southern species has an odd history in Nebraska over the past thirty years. My first ever was a bird at an Omaha suet feeder on Christmas Eve 1979, one of the great novelties of local birders’ year; but then the next spring, singing birds appeared in the Fontenelle Forest lowlands, and they’ve been back every year since (check out that little red dot on Nat Geo’s range map). I was listening hard Monday morning, and never heard so much as a chip–but one silent bird popped up in a sycamore for me just about where I’d expected to find them. Much more surprising was a second individual a considerable distance south, on the east shore of Hidden Lake, a site where I’d never seen the species before. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to see the bird’s lore clearly enough to identify it to race.

Meanwhile, of course, wonders like American Redstart, Myrtle Warbler, Orange-crowned Warbler, Tennessee Warbler, Common Yellowthroat, and Northern Waterthrush had all appeared to delight me and the growing crowd of warbler-watchers. I headed to the mouth of one of the hollows where I thought the other waterthrush had been reported this spring, and sure enough, just a few moments later I was watching a beauteous pair of Louisiana Waterthrushes feed on the mud. As I look back, I’m not certain I’d ever had better views of this often reclusive bird ,and I was doubly happy to run into another Northern Waterthrush just after leaving the Louisianas, for a comparison with memory still fresh.

There was another southern species I wanted to try for, so I set off south, past the marsh and a new little “prairie” garden; I had great views of a Marsh Wren, one of only two for the day, but the noisy Sedge Wrens singing from the tall grass eluded the eye–which was caught instead by a set of white tail corners landing on the path ahead of me.

Western Palm Warbler has always been one of my favorite parulids, a pretty bird seen close up and very distinctive–and distinctively unwarblerish–in its pipit-like habits.

But I was headed for Hidden Lake, past Great Crested and Least Flycatchers, Harris’s and White-throated Sparrows, and more Northern Parulas. Finally, at the south end of the lake, just below the house I lived in when I started birding lo-these-many ago, I heard it: the frank, sweet tweeting of a Prothonotary Warbler. This is not (or at least was not) a rare bird in the area, but to think that it was probably (well, just barely possibly) a direct descendant of the first individual I ever saw was appealing, so I sat down to wait for it to become more than just a ringing golden voice.

As usual, the bird was completely fearless, and soon enough he was singing and feeding from the low-hanging branches in front of me, spending a fair amount of time flycatching, too, a behavior I don’t associate with this species at all (in fact, BNA says that flycatching accounts for less than 5% of the bird’s feeding effort).

At that point, I left the lowlands to try my luck on the rapidly greening ridges and ravines of the river bluffs above. Warblers were scant up there, though I did hear a Yellow-throated Vireo, another eastern specialty more easily found in Fontenelle Forest than just about anywhere else in the state. And thrush numbers were impressive. American Robin and Eastern Bluebird, common breeders, both, were conspicuously outnumbered by Swainson’s Thrushes, their little plipping notes almost constant on the dark hillsides.

I’d had a single Gray-cheeked Thrush in the lowlands, and Wood Thrushes were tuning up here and there, so it was a great thrush day. But no “new” parulids for the tally until I reached the new playground (!–expressions of indignant incredulity and horror on request) they’ve built in the northern uplands. There, creeping above the garish plastic toys and loud marimbas (what on earth?), was the day’s first and only Black-and-white Warbler, a bird I’d expected to be the first, not the last, of an excellent warbler-watch.

It was a busy week in the midwest, but the moments in between–the spandrels of my time–were happily filled at Carolyn’s feeders. Perhaps most of note was the continuing presence of several Pine Siskins, a species that breeds in southeast Nebraska every few years: this looks like one of them.

Winter lingerers and residents shared the buffet with arriving migrants. Chipping Sparrows, out of their breeding habitat in the walnut, oak, and linden woods, were willing nonetheless to gobble the millet sprinkled on the ground.

At least one Lincoln’s Sparrow, somber and beautiful, joined the frenzy.

Even a featherless quadruped or two stopped by.

Carolyn’s switch from oilseed to safflower has cut down on her squirrels, but there were still a number of foxy Eastern Fox-Squirrels.

This guy was a white-bellied red morph, but there were also brown-bellied reds and quite a few black-morph individuals. More surprising, at least by the standards of three decades ago, were the Eastern Gray Squirrels I saw: one at Carolyn’s feeders and one in Fontenelle Forest. That is, or at least was, a very rare mammal so far north in Nebraska.

The highlight of springtime feeders, of course, are the colorful migrants that give such stunningly close looks. Rose-breasted Grosbeaks, just arriving on April 30, were all over the feeders by the time I left on Tuesday, and at least one male Ruby-throated Hummingbird was already monopolizing the sugar water. A male Summer Tanager, to my memory about as rare as Eastern Gray Squirrel that far north, arrived on May 4; Carolyn tells me that a pair of that species has frequented the grape jelly for a couple of summers in a row now.

My favorites, though, and how could it be otherwise?, were the Baltimore Orioles. It just doesn’t seem right that so common a bird could be so breathtaking, but seen against the dark background of greening trees in the mist, there’s nothing like it.

Carolyn and I were keeping ebird lists from her yard each day I was there, regularly scoring two dozen species during a ten-minute feederwatch from the living room. I’m sure by now all migration has broken loose, and tallies are probably approaching 40 in the woods out the window.