Soft March morning

     Sometimes it's the unspectacular that pulls a little joy out of your heart and into the open.
     This morning after a snowshoe with the dogs, I stopped in the front yard to listen. It was a soft morning. The sky was overcast in a high light gray, the temperature warmed a degree or two above freezing. The winds we had earlier this week were gone, and it was calm. And the birds were singing.
     This track is quiet, so you might want your headphones or earbuds. It's an interplay of some of our feeder birds. We often don't hear them because our windows are closed, or we don't pay attention because they are the background sound when we go out to get in the car, retrieve the mail or newspaper, take out the compost or walk the dogs. I've annotated it below so you can play around with the track. Then go outside, and listen on a quiet morning.  The birds know spring is coming.

 
0:01               a short "chip", probably a Northern Cardinal
0:03 - 0:06   American Goldfinch chatter, sometimes sounds like "potato chip"
0:04               Cardinal song fragment 
0:07               Black-capped Chickadee 2-note song starts, runs the whole track
0:08 -0:12     Mourning Dove (hard to hear without headphones)
0:13 - 0:18     two increasingly complete Cardinal songs
0:24 - 0:29    Mourning Dove
0:31                 American Crow echoing around in the far background
0:34 - 0:45    Cardinal song arcing in and becoming chatter
0:42 - 0:47    Mourning Dove
0:45                Crows are echoing around again