October 19, 2000 - I know the season is changing into autumn by the signs I see along the trails. During the first week in October, I was told that a storm was raging up north, and I knew the migratory birds would speed away southward which meant new arrivals for the Feather River country and various refuges including the Lake Merritt Wildlife Refuge in Oakland.

Along the river it was delightful to see the return of the ruby-crowned kinglets, and although they are generally more solitary, popping through the low trees in a neverending search for insects, my first awareness of their presence was a bunch in a foothill pine where 50 or more fed in a frantic frenzy as if just arriving from a long journey.

Evidently, they travel in flocks, and then spread out in their winter habitat, but the pine flock was eager to refuel spent energy and foraged without reservation. How ironic, I thought, that they dropped out of the sky on that particular pine when millions of other location possibilities existed. It is somewhat like nesting birds selecting some particular tree when a vast number of sites are available.

The kinglets are so dainty in a big world full of rough-hewned obstacles, yet they are successful in combating predators and precarious precipices and restock their habitat niches with sufficient numbers.

When you try to focus your binoculars on a kinglet, the bird is here this moment and gone the next. Such a nervous bird! They are constantly flitting their wings and dashing through the branches sharply investigating every inch of the middle story of tree life. Only the Audubon's warbler offers competition along the river, also occupying the same level and behaving in a similar nervous, insect-eating matter. How many uncountable hordes of insects do they eat?

In a summer season that witnessed toooo many wildfires, insect producing habitat has been reduced, and the kinglets that normally would be prowling the thousands of acres that were burned, have to relocate and double the competition in remaining woods. When habitat is reduced by fire, whatever the cause, the food supply is reduced for several seasons.

Another sign of autumn arrival was the curious little hole tapped in the almond tree down by the Feather River Nature Center. Although I hadn't seen the bird, I knew the hole was caused by the sapsucker, a woodpecker that makes a lateral migration from the mountains to the lowlands. It is wonderful the way various bird species occupy different regions of the environment and are adapted for different methods of obtaining food; the tiny bill of the kinglet designed for catching insects and the stronger bill of the sapsucker for drilling holes.

During the early October rainstorm, thousands of swallows dashed anxiously over the river, suddenly faced with a flight to more productive south lands. Some leave, and some come, every autumn and every spring. There is no end of amazement in their organization. Who leads and who decides when to depart? Is it part of that, "They know without knowing they know," mentality expressed by John Burroughs?

Even though I am 150 miles away from the salt water refuge of Lake Merritt, I know about now in October migratory diving ducks will be suddenly appearing on the lake. One morning you look, and there they are, a couple hundred scaups or goldeneye ducks, either setting down in the night or maybe in the rosy light of dawn. Every year. Some things are unpredictable, but you just know the migrants are coming, and it is like greeting old friends to again see them on waters nearby.

For the bird watcher, and for the nature devotees in the city, the privilege to see birds in all their mysterious majesty, is one of the greater joys of life. Not only is it a remarkable physical feat to maneuver over the awesomeness of the Arctic, but there is a romantic quality connected with that wild flight that stirs the soul of earth bound man.

"...All day thy wings have fanned

at that far height the cold thin atmosphere,

Yet weary, sinketh not, to the welcome land,

Though the dark night is near...

Seeketh thou the plashy brink of weedy lake

or marge of river wide?

Or where the rocking billows rise and sink

Against the chaffed oceanside?...