It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year

This content is adapted from an Editor’s Note appearing on p. 6 of the May 2026 issue of Birding magazine.

I’m writing this on a quite cold morning in late February. It’s sunny, though, and subtle signs of spring are all around. The neighborhood Spotted Towhee has started singing, sort of. The wintertime Bushtit flocks are disbanding. And the ducks at the marsh at the end of the street are getting frisky.

There will be setbacks in the weeks ahead. It will snow again. It always does in March and April and even May where I live just east of the foothills of the Colorado Rockies. Spring in these parts is a two-steps-forward, one-step backward affair. But we’re getting there. Any day now, I expect the first Say’s Phoebes, Mountain Bluebirds, and Sandhill Cranes. And by the time this issue hits inboxes and mailboxes, it will be full-on, full-throttle May migration.

I’ll come right out and say it: May is the best month of the year in the ABA Area. It’s not even close. Look, I love CBCs and BBAs and #Novembird as much as the next guy, but nothing can compare with the pageantry and majesty of warblers dripping from the trees in May. In my first full year as a go-birding-every-day birder, I was blown away by the month of May. Spring migration had been an exaggeratedly, painfully slow-motion affair that spring at the tail end of the eighth grade: some blackbirds, a Chipping Sparrow, and not much else. I lived in an urban neighborhood in a big Rust Belt city, and I birded within walking distance of home. Then the calendar turned to May, and the floodgates opened. In the nanoscopic abandoned lot behind our small backyard: an exquisite Nashville Warbler, a bewitching Black-and-white Warbler, and a brilliant-as-the-noonday-sun Northern Yellow Warbler. Total commoners, I would soon come to acknowledge, but they were lifers all, and I was instantly a confirmed and proud warbler addict.

Since that time, I’ve gone on to witness the May warbler migration at legendary hotspots all across the ABA Area: Montrose, Tawas Point, Mt. Auburn, and gotta put a plug in for Pittsburgh’s Frick Park; spectacular flights across the Gulf states; and farther west, the brilliant vagrant traps in Wyoming, Colorado, and New Mexico. It’s not all warblers, either: The May shorebird flights in Nevada’s Lahontan Valley and Alaska’s Lower Cook Inlet are just as evocative.

And . . . That’s all I got. There’s no deep philosophy in this one. See my recent Editor’s notes for some of that. (Sneak peek: See also my Editor’s note in the next issue.) That’s “all” I got, yeah. “Just” warblers, those tiny fluffballs in the treetops in big Rust Belt cities. You’d need about 500 of them to weigh as much as a newborn human.

A Cerulean Warbler peers in at eye level, lifting the spirits of the photographer and his friends Skillethead and the late Tony Fitzpatrick. Mississippi Palisades State Park, Carroll Co., Illinois; May 16, 2021. Photo by © Greg Neise.

I had a friend, the late Chuck Tague, who wrote a stirring essay, in a privately circulated newsletter, about The Greatest Show on Earth—the spring warbler flight across western Pennsylvania, where I grew up and where Chuck settled down after coming back from Vietnam. Hardscrabble coal country. Crumbling infrastructure. A land left behind by the knowledge economy. And yet warblers. Hundreds of them. Thousands. Over the course of a season, millions. Each one of them a mere clump of feathers, but also a blaze of glory, impossibly beautiful, scarcely the mass of a quarter, packed with so much motive power as to lift our spirits for a lifetime.

And . . . Dang it, there I go, getting all philosophical, metaphysical even. So I’ll relent now. And leave you with this: Go out and watch some warblers. Right now. Whatever else you’ve got going on, it can wait. Because this. is. it. The Greatest Show on Earth.

Be well,

Keep in touch,

And good birding!

Ted Floyd
Editor, Birding