My husband mowed the yard this weekend. While we usually wait until early May, the spring rain helped the grass grow tall by mid-April. As I’m writing, my street is bursting with birdsong- in just a few minutes, I hear Northern Cardinals and European Starlings. Without binoculars, a visual count is quick and rough: 11 species, 40 individuals.

I’ve been a lazy birder so far this year. I feel ashamed for neglecting my duty to my patch, choosing instead to sleep in whenever I have the chance. My shame leads to guilt; who else but me can capture spring migration in my patch, as millions of birds soar overhead at night and refresh themselves here by the hundreds during the day? There isn’t any good reason for any of my choices, simply my own lame excuses like “poor time management” and “too stressed to sleep.” For now, I have this moment, perched on my back porch at the edge of my patch.

Patch birding isn’t a new phenomenon. Birding by patch, selecting a local place and birding regularly, is easy and accessible to all birders. A patch is typically small, ranging from a single yard up to a few square miles. In my opinion, some of the best birding reads are British patch blogs, the daily reports of dedicated village birders. Two favorites are Birding with a Sketchbook and Confessions of a lapsed birder, both who use nature sketching and journaling to record their patch adventures.

My patch starts in my yard, following the street up the hill and down the other side to the dock. It’s a one mile walk for me, and in this walk, I cover an area of about 14 acres. Compared to others, my patch is not very large or complex. Land use varies between village homes of simple yards, roadways, and State Park lands dominated by invasive shrubs, “reclaimed” farmland, and the lake.

The patch has its regulars, as all patches do. In spring, Red-winged Blackbirds and American Robins sweep through. Summer is dominated by European Starlings and Common Grackles calling from the treetops. Fall is for Northern Cardinals and Tufted Titmice to flit through shrubs searching for berries and seeds. Winter is totally owned by Dark-eyed Juncos and Mourning Doves scurrying through the snow under feeders.

In comparison to the patches around me, my species list is low… only 28 species in total. My limit is my birding style: slow visual birding accompanied with a limited repertoire of memorized birdsong. The effects of multiple concussions in conjunction with dyscalculia aren’t a great combination in a birder. I can hear and appreciate the birdsong, but my brain struggles to parse the sounds into identification.

It’s like this: if I’m listening to an orchestral piece, I can identify the percussion section from the woodwinds, but I can’t tell the difference between a clarinet and a saxophone. When I am listening to birdsong, I can identify the strong voices, yet most are a jumble of notes, a melody of immeasurable beauty but total mystery. I can tell the characteristic oak-a-lee of a Red-winged Blackbird from gentle coo of a Mourning Dove … but the rest? Good luck. If you bird my patch with me, I will need your help more than you would need mine.

Despite my struggles, focusing on my patch makes birding a simple affair. In the morning, I can do a yard list while sipping coffee on the back porch. Lunch walks are to the dock, cheap binoculars around my neck and eBird queued up on my phone. I know who to expect, and just about when. Some days, I feel as if the locals know about when and where to expect me.

After yard birding, I return indoors, tired of fighting the wind’s pull at my notebook pages. From my reading chair, I can see the Starlings fluttering in my neighbor’s tree. A pair has taken over the winter roost mounted on the side of my garage, undeterred by my daily emptying of the box and replacing the hole cover.

Even though they carry the title as my life’s nemesis, European Starlings are the most common in my yard. Their broken, jagged calls greet me as I slowly bird from my back porch in the mornings. They are the bulk of my eBird lists, the most cheerful and clever of my avian neighbors. Closely following are House Sparrows and American Robins, both which live close to my home 80% of the year. The species I most desire for my yard are Purple Martins, but the Starlings have made short work of any scout attempting to check this block for gourds.

As competitive as birding may be, I have found patch birding to be the best. Staying close to home and building my relationship with the birds that live here helps me feel connected to the cyclical changes in nature. My life would feel incomplete if I didn’t watch the Starlings harass and harangue each other. I will never be a bird photographer or a lister, just a simple “patcher” with a love for the locals.

The US Army Corps of Engineers have closed the sluice gates, and now the dam is beginning to fill up again. I will miss seeing the skeletons of old Howard as I walk over the bridge, but I am hopeful for spring.

We are a week past the vernal equinox, but spring really does not begin until the dam starts to fill. Yes, the Red-winged Blackbirds have been here for two weeks, and the American Robins have been sprinting across yards since February, yet it was not truly spring. When the Bald Eagle spills over its ancient banks and spreads into what was once the brickyards and farmlands, I know spring has arrived.

I am at odds with my other feelings on the turning of the seasons. Summer begins with fireflies dancing at dusk. Fall sweeps through with the calls of migrating wild geese. Winter arrives with gusting winds to carry away the last of the leaves. Spring begins with a human activity, timed to the early rains.

All aspects of my outdoor life revolve around the lake, or lack thereof. I do not fish until the water reaches the Boat Club Dock. I will hunt fossils at Christmas when the exposed lake bed is frozen. I arrange my hikes and walks around what birds are close to shore, and swim when the water is right. For me, the rising levels of the water mark the start of the year.

I must admit- what I love most about the park, the lake, is a source of hate for others. The completion of the dam and filling of its basin is a cause for generational loathing of government overreach here, even when the work is warranted. Without the dam, billions of dollars of damage and human displacement would have happened, and continue to happen, along the lower reaches of the Bald Eagle.

As I look up valley from the causeway bridge, I see what could have been my inheritance; farmland from ancestors whose deeds would have passed from my great-grandfather, to pappy, to dad, to me. I see the remains of the road and railway, the routes the milkman drove and kids bicycled. Too, I see the fish hides and cormorant poles and trash, signs of recent life.

This spot on the bridge is important to me. From it, I once threw a necklace gifted to me by a boyfriend into the lake. The jewelry instead landed on a passing boater, having slid under the bridge before I could stop myself. The boater slowed, looked up, and commented “Jeez, this looks cheap. He must have really sucked!” before dropping it in the water. (Reader, the boater was, in fact, right!)

Another time, I leaned on the bridge as I watched an Osprey in my binoculars, full of wonder as it dived into the water in search of fish. Or even when I have dashed out on a freezing day to sight Tundra Swans stopping to refresh themselves on their migration north. Deep in my diary are countless stories of college days fishing and having park rangers stop and give me hell for screwing around when I should have been in class.

Deep down inside, I feel that without the dam, I never would have been born. The dam would have never been built if the river hadn’t meandered down this valley, which in turn wouldn’t have happened if the glaciers wouldn’t have receded and allowed the earth to rebound, changing the direction of the Susquehanna and, in turn, creating the Bald Eagle… one long unbroken chain of cause and effect.

Too, cause and effect control the seasons; Earth’s axial tilt and position relative to the sun (cause) creates the conditions required for the seasons (effect). The increasing rains from the seasonal shifts in weather patterns (cause) require the Engineers to draw down the water levels of the lake (effect). They close the gates when barely anything remains (cause) allowing for runoff to accumulate and start the calendar of my year (effect).

We live in a complex web of connection; one small action creates a cascade of change. The changes happening in spring mean different things for each person that experiences it… I interpret the movement of seasons differently than you do. If I were not finely attuned to the lake, I would instead associate the beginning of spring with hearing the calls of Red-winged Blackbirds like my mother, or the start of trout season, like my grandfather.

As I walk back off the bridge and return to my car, I hear the cackling of a Bald Eagle. Like me, it looks forward to the return of the lake. How else would it feed its baby, if it were not for the fish in its waters?