Autumn's southbound parade of songbirds has passed midpoint. I expect nineteen species this week, up from five in late July, but headed down from twenty-one in mid-September. By month's end, all will fade into the distance. The color guard of warblers, not so colorful now, has traveled south already. Blue-gray gnatcatchers, empidonax flycatchers, Baltimore orioles, and Wilson's warblers -- common fall migrants -- are strung throughout. Thrushes, catbirds, and Nashville warblers come at the end with kinglets, yellow-rumped and orange-crowned warblers, blue-headed vireos, brown thrashers, and northern flickers, who take a break for winter residency. Before dawn a cold front rains migrants at my door. A summer tanager eats roughleaf dogwood berries, and a gray catbird catcalls from beautyberries. Yellow-breasted chats, northern yellowthroats, and mourning warblers search for insects in goldeneyes. Wilson's and orange-crowned warblers peruse possumhaws. An out-of-place marsh wren forages with the chats and yellow-throats, its familiars from a marshland summer. Some birding neighbors "hound" the marsh wren, because they haven't seen one before. I hope they're as interested in its message about the ravine's safe harbor as they are about the messenger.

"What about your life list?" the birders ask, "since you've been so many places." I answer that I keep records of messengers and especially of their messages to remind me of nature's basic principles, as I try to compromise my life with natural history. Once I did a lot of name and specimen collecting but that was partly youthful insecurity, when trophies were proof of ability, and partly a time when my science needed the vouchers. Slowly, though, I learned to learn with patient looking, listening, touching, and smelling, although I don't decry listing that is learning or specimens that represent necessary messages.