I am writing this on May 11 at the

I am writing this on May 11 at the height of spring migration. Millions of birds are passing over Virginia — often at an altitude of 7,000 feet — c.i their way to breedings grounds in New England and Canada.

Most of these birds have wintered in the American tropics and have followed corridors without walls over open water and ridden the winds for 80 hours, non-stop. Those nesting in Virginia will stop to sing and nest; others will continue their flight.

How many will return to the patch of woods where they nested — or hatched from an egg — last summer to find the trees gone and a shopping mall or housing development where they once sang and Reproduced themselves? ; When I think of spring migration, I think of warblers, those splendors in ^miniature. Or as one naturalist wrote ... telling fragments of reality.”

Warblers are a distinctly New World family of birds. Most are small — rarely more than four inches long — and display brilliant colors and patterns of plumage. They don’t really warble with, as the dictionary states, "... gentle trilling note.” Yet, warbler songs are distinctive.

I taught myself these songs when very young. I was near-sighted, not yet diagnosed, when I discovered birds as the passion of my life, so I had to stalk to get close to the ever-active little birds, full of fits and starts. This waiting and quiet stalking, all the while hearing the tiny bird, implanted the pattern, frequency and distinctive quality of the song on my mind. , Now, when I hear a warbler, I give it a name on the basis of memory. Afterward, if I am lucky, I find the bright bird. When feeding on tiny, newly-emerged caterpillars in the treetops, warblers flit, zoom, and dart and are, as one naturalist wrote, “full of all-of-a-sudden.”

Persistence in warbler watching is rewarded with brilliance and an astonishing combination of colors — black, yellow, red, blue, white, olive green, or even gold.

Lee Trott and I have recently returned from a week in the Carolina Low Country,