Something’s happening here. It took me a long time to get to that point. 
Now I had to figure out what.
A friend and I were walking a trail unfamiliar to me at a place in Cape May County called Lizard Tail Swamp, owned by The Nature Conservancy. It was a hot afternoon in late May, and we were actually butterflying and botanizing more than birding, which perhaps is the only excuse I have for the dull birding reflexes.
A bird chinking ahead of us finally woke me up. We were in a closed canopy oak-pine forest, mostly oak, with a low but dense understory of blueberry, and the chink did not compute for Rose-breasted Grosbeak or any other bird that might be in this kind of habitat in May, either as a migrant or breeder.
I ignored the chinking for a while, but it persisted, and eventually we tracked down the Blue Grosbeak.
“What’s he doing here?” I wondered. As we watched, the grosbeak, way out of its normal brushy habitat, seemed quite at home, picking caterpillars from under leaves, and even pausing to whisper-sing a few times.
“Look at all the Red-winged Blackbirds,” my friend, Beth, pointed. There were indeed over a dozen, also out of habitat and behaving much like the grosbeak.
Again, “What are they doing here?”
“Hey, waxwings! And look, Eastern Kingbird. Yellow-billed Cuckoo!”
Enough. We’d seen the egg masses. We’d seen the old pupal cases. We’d seen the early instar caterpillars swinging on silken threads. We’d heard the frass falling to the forest floor. We’d walked through all that, and a lot of bird activity, not noticing a thing.
What was happening here was a massive emergence of new, tender gypsy moth caterpillars, which in turn attracted many birds. There’s a piece of birding fieldcraft in itself—birds go where the food is, so to find birds, find food.
“Stop, look and listen” is one of the most common pieces of advice we hear. Our parents and teachers started telling it to us when we were little and we’ve heard it ever since, and probably told it to our own kids or students. The business of being aware of your surroundings may be old news to birders, but I often reflect on how many birds we walk by, how many natural wonders we miss through inattention, being lost in a reverie, or simply looking the wrong way at the right time. The episode in Lizard Tail Swamp was an extreme example of this, and a lesson. While birding, pause frequently, look around you, listen carefully, and seek not only birds but circumstances that might change your birding, and your day.