Watching & listening for the spring bird migration

Happy Monday, DMV! It’s March 9.

This weekend, I closed out my chapter on winter and turned the page to spring.

I wrapped up one of my big winter projects: After about five weeks, I finished the impossible blue jigsaw puzzle I was working on. Here’s my visual timeline:

Now I know how to do a difficult puzzle in which 20 percent of the pieces are one color; I actually stumbled upon a Reddit thread(!) about how hard this one is. Ultimately, I enjoyed dropping into a deep zen state (perhaps bordering on self-flagellation) and testing each piece to find the one that fit like a glove. When I wrote about the puzzle on Feb. 25, one reader told me that for his friend who loved difficult puzzles, he found one that was “all black with no detail and in the shape of a circle.” Yikes.

This bird puzzle is a detail from a Charley Harper painting called “Mystery of the Missing Migrants” — which segues perfectly into my next topic: spring and the bird migration data of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.

As I write these words, I went to their BirdCast website … and I kid you not: This exact painting is on their homepage (as of March 8). Was it always there? I go to this site each spring and fall, but perhaps I just hadn’t noticed until I became intimately acquainted with every single detail of this painting? What a coincidence — this puzzle was a freebie from my neighborhood! (Update: For those of you who use the Merlin Bird ID app, my husband pointed out that it also uses a bird image from this painting!)

One of my favorite things to do in migration season is to monitor BirdCast’s live migration data, in hope that I will hear the birds overhead. And mere minutes after I placed the final puzzle piece — as I headed out for a Friday night out with my husband and daughter — we heard geese passing over our home.

We stood on our front lawn, looking up toward their honking calls, but the cloud cover was too thick to see them. So we paused … to listen and embrace the fleeting moment.

Not of the jigsaw variety: Puzzled Pint requires “logic, wordplay, and some out-of-the-box thinking,” according to Sam Freund, one of the organizers for the meetup in the D.C.-Arlington area. It’s at 7 p.m. tomorrow night: You need to solve a puzzle to learn the venue. (Though they make it so you can’t really fail.)

I’ve spotted a lot of cool events coming up, though I can’t make it to all of them. Here are a few:

What other signs of spring have you seen? The creek near my home has again become a loud chorus of birdsong every morning and evening. There was the guy I spotted yesterday in his red vintage BMW convertible with the top down. Snowdrops were early floral arrivals, along with crocuses.

Ashish Gupta, a reader whom I met in person at an event Thursday night, snapped this photo Thursday morning.

“I am a runner, but am recovering from a minor surgery which frustrates that activity. I had run a slow short distance this foggy morning and saw these snowdrops along the Sligo Creek Trail in Takoma Park. They are the perfect harbingers of spring, and lifted my mood,” he wrote.

Allison Hamilton-Rohe, 54, snapped this pic of snowdrops in her garden in Silver Spring, Maryland. She said she has been building up her garden over the last five years.

“I took this pic the minute I spied them & have a whole photo album journey of my garden month by month to track the new additions and celebrate how the older bulbs & plants are naturalizing,” she said.

Share your recent photos of life in the DMV here.

🪿