Earlier this year, I mentioned in a post that in visiting the Sapsucker Woods Sanctuary at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, I saw a good number of birds, but only three I had never seen in Somerville: tree swallow, golden-crowned kinglet, and red-bellied woodpecker. I also mentioned that I thought that at some point, all three would show up here. Well, here it is six months later, and I've just bagged the second of the three: golden-crowned kinglet (I saw tree swallows on a number of occasions over the summer).
I see ruby-crowned kinglets every year, both in my yard and by the Mystic, usually in the months of April and October. They're usually in little flocks. This golden-crowned, however, was by itself, in some trees and bushes in a little fenced area next to I-93. There's no birdwatching in Somerville unaccompanied by the sound of traffic, or, these days on the Mystic, the smell of hamburgers.
