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After six months of hearing nothing but the chattering of chickadees and cawing of ravens, there’s nothing Phillip Martin likes better than hearing the loud, rolling trill of a ruby-crowned kinglet echoing through the woods.

“It always makes me smile when I hear that for the first time each spring,” Martin said of the tiny, red-headed birds, which weigh less than a quarter ounce. “Their song is so out of proportion to their body size.”

While most Fairbanks residents identify the sight and sound of a honking Canada goose as a harbinger of spring in Alaska’s second-largest city, elite bird watchers like Martin, a migratory bird biologist for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in Fairbanks, see and hear things differently.

For Dave Shaw, it’s the flute-like song of a Swainson’s thrush that signals the true change of seasons in Fairbanks, usually sometime in early May.

“When I hear Swainson’s thrushes each year, it’s a real sign spring and summer are here,” Shaw, a research biologist for the Alaska Bird Observatory, said. “That’s my favorite bird song.”

The song that Fairbanks birder Nancy DeWitt yearns for each spring is the melodic, fluty warble of the hermit thrush.

“When I hear that guy sing for first time in the spring it makes my heart sing,” said DeWitt, former executive director of the Alaska Bird Observatory and one of Fairbanks’ foremost birding authorities.

DeWitt also appreciates seeing raptors soaring across the skies each spring.

“Saturday I was driving up to Skiland and on top of (Cleary) summit there was a sharp-shinned hawk diving a buteo hawk,” she said. “That was exciting. They were the first hawks of spring.”

So excited was DeWitt that she stopped and called her husband and fellow birder, Jim, to share the news.

“I couldn’t keep driving,” she said. “I had to tell somebody.”

This weekend, DeWitt and a handful of other dedicated birders will make their annual drive to Delta Junction to scan the skies above the agricultural fields for hawks, falcons and eagles.

Songs of spring

While a few raptors and waterfowl species are beginning to trickle into the Tanana Valley, it will be another week or two before songbirds arrive in any kind of audible numbers. American robins, ruby-crowned kinglets, American tree sparrows, yellow-rumped warblers and varied thrushes are typically the first songs that Fairbanks residents will hear.

Naturalist Mark Ross joined Martin in the ruby-crowned kinglet camp.

“A ruby-crowned kinglet means spring to me,” said Ross, who is the education coordinator for the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, said. “It’s such a big voice and such a tiny bird.

American tree sparrows also rank high on Ross’ list of favorites.

“I’m keeping my ears open right now for the first American tree sparrow,” he said.

Though he’s a raptor guy and looks forward to seeing hawks and falcons each spring, it’s the sound of a Hammond’s flycatcher that catches the attention of Ted Swem, a biologist at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

“I love hearing that little ‘schwip,’ that little single note that indicates the male is back on its territory and doing his thing,” Swem said.

Part of his infatuation with Hammond’s flycatchers is the fact they seem to follow him around.

“I’ve lived in three different yards in Fairbanks, and I’ve always had nesting Hammond’s flycatchers in my yard,” said Swem, who is also a fan of ruby-crowned kinglets.

Sue Guers, a research biologist at the Alaska Bird Observatory, said it’s not spring in Fairbanks until American golden plovers arrive in early May.

“Once they’re here I know (it’s spring),” she said. “They come right when greenup happens.”

Guers, who heads up the ABO’s summer banding station at Creamer’s Field, set up mist nets Tuesday to begin capturing early-arriving songbirds. Typically, the first birds caught in the nets are sleight-colored juncos and yellow warblers in mid-April, she said.

“This snow might slow things down,” Guers said of spring migration, adding that she had to use a snowmachine to set up the nets on Tuesday.

Special time

After a long, dark, cold winter, the beginning of spring migration is a special time for most Alaskans, but for people like Ross, who can identify most birds by sound, hearing the first migratory birds of the season is almost a magical experience.

“It’s a very powerful exciting thing to hear the songs of these first migrants,” Ross said. “It’s hard to verbalize.”

The combination of more daylight, warmer temperatures and the arrival of birds makes this a special time to be in Alaska, agreed Swem.

“For life lovers, this is just a wonderful time of year,” Swem said.

Migration is almost like Christmas, Shaw said. Every day a new present arrives under — or in — the trees.

“This time of year every day is exciting,” he said. “You don’t know what’s going to show up.”

The sight of snow buntings in mid-March, the first passerines to show up, offer light at the end of the tunnel that is winter in Fairbanks for Tricia Blake, education coordinator at the Alaska Bird Observatory

“To me, snow buntings are the first sign that spring is coming and winter will indeed end,” she said, though that hasn’t necessarily been the case this spring, since snow buntings were first seen around Fairbanks about a month ago.

Though she studies songbirds at the Alaska Bird Observatory, senior biologist Susan Sharbaugh said it is the bugling of a sandhill crane that stirs her soul each spring.

“I’m usually on my way to the outhouse and I hear the first couple of cranes,” said Sharbaugh, who lives in the Goldstream Valley. “That sound rising from the valley is music to my ears.”

Melissa Sikes, program director for Friends of Creamer’s Field, is also a crane fan.

“Sandhill cranes,” Sikes said when asked what bird she looks forward to seeing return to Fairbanks. “To me they’re very stately the way they hold themselves. There’s something about their long necks and long legs.”

For Dan Gibson, collections manager for ornithology at the University of Alaska Museum, it’s not an arriving migrant that gets him excited. Rather, Gibson always looks forward to seeing his first northern hawk owl or northern shrike, resident birds that aren’t seen much in the winter but reappear each spring in late March or early April, a sign that migration is abut to take off.

“I like seeing them because it finally means something is going to happen,” Gibson said. “I leave (UAF) campus one day in the last week of March and there’s a beautiful adult shrike sitting in a tree that hasn’t had a bird in it since last September.

“I enjoy the heck out of that,” he said.

Contact staff Writer Tim Mowry at 459-7587.