Allergies arrive with the warblers and we itch to go birding

In “The Wasteland,”T. S. Eliot dubs April the “cruellest month.” His judgment has nothing to do with April Fool’s Day pranks. It does have a lot to do with the weather.

John James Audubon called it the Blue-winged Yellow Warbler. Brevity is the way today. After all, it’s the Twitter Age.

My problem with April has to do with birds (of course), mold and pollen. On the one hand, I look forward with almost ecstatic anticipation to picking up a bunch of migrating species, especially warblers. On the other hand, I dread the onset of miserable itchy eyes and persistent sneezing. Eliot is right. April has its ups and downs.

That said, brother Phil, wife Fran and I will be looking for the earlier warblers come April 11 at the Marais de Cygnes National Wildlife Refuge about 50 miles south of Kansas City on the Kansas side. (Marais de Cygne, by the way, means Swan Marsh. I’ve never seen a swan there.) We’ll probably be out several more times before mid-May, catching the migration waves, you might say.

Last year in May, we saw Blue-winged Warblers at the James A. Reed Memorial Wildlife Area near Lee’s Summit, Missouri. They were a life lister for me – also really striking birds. At first I thought the colors I was seeing must be a trick of the early light. It won’t be easy to duplicate that experience this year, so we’ll go for number of species rather than first-time species.

In years past on these spring outings, we’ve seen Common Yellowthroat, Yellow-rumped, Yellow, Tennessee, Black-and-white, Prothonotary, Kentucky and Wilson’s warblers as well as Northern Waterthrushes and Redstarts and probably a few others I’ve forgotten about. Doesn’t seem like very many species, but we’ve always gone just once in May. This time we’ll do it at least twice, three times if we’re lucky.

In keeping with its reputation, April will, of course, be cruel. We’ll probably get rain and cold at least once, ticks and mosquitoes later in the month, slippery mud and other discouragements. However, we will endure, in spite of eyes that are sources of torture despite medication.

No endeavor worth pursuing, no matter how idiotic, is ever without challenges. This is what I will tell myself.

Official Big Year species count as of April 3: 106