Willow warbler

Uh, but yeah, it's really shifted a gear.

I feel like a lot of the summer stuff has, has really cleared out more suddenly than I'm used to.

So things like white throats and willow warblers, there was a really sudden stop to those in the last few weeks.

And anyway, we're-

Okay

It is at first rather sad to find silence reigning in the thickets and reed beds that were alive with songsters during the summer term.

The familiar pollards and thorn bushes, where the willow warblers and white throats were every morning to be seen or heard, are like so many desolate college rooms in the heart of the long vacation.

Deserted nests, black and mouldy, come to light as the leaves drop from the trees.

Nurseries whose children have gone forth to try their fortune in distant countries.

In front of my drawing-room window in the country are always two rows of hedges of sweet peas and another of edible peas.

Towards the end of summer some little pale yellow birds come frequently and climb up and down the pea-sticks, apparently in search of insects rather than of the peas.

These are the young willow warblers, which, after their first molt, assume this gently toned yellow tint, and very graceful and beautiful creatures they are.

I have sometimes seen them hover like hummingbirds over a spray on which they could not get an easy footing, and give the stem or leaves a series of rapid pecks.

Birds are all right here if there isn't any gold.

I have been into the woods only twice so far, but secured another rare specimen of Hennikot's Willow Warbler.

There is a bear in the woods back of camp.

I have laid for him three times, but he is very shy.

Questions of whether to turn on the heating or not arise and will surely be answered by the end of the month.

What can we see this month that makes it September and not another month? The Swift is the earliest departure slipping away in August while the Willow Warbler follows a little later.

But I guess overall September is marked as a time of goings.

I see the swallow depart around the third week of the month, though some from further north, what I call the Donegal Swallows, pass through a little later and take any remaining summer with them.

I don't record the date the Chiff Chaff leaves, but I can still hear them in the garden well into mid-September.

I probably notice them more than the Willow Warbler because they're the more enthusiastic singer of the two.

The Willow Warbler, with its longer journey, falls quite and leaves that bit earlier.

It is a month for the Horse Chestnut to shed its conkers but perhaps a less acknowledged marker of the month is the burst of colour we see from the Devil Bits Scabious.