Jupiter and I share an interest in local birds. I mentioned in a previous column that I have become enthralled with Cornell’s Merlin bird app, and I still have much more to explore with it. Right now I’m happy with its bird song/call recording feature. I have already learned a lot. I just go to Merlin Bird Identification on my cellphone, step out onto my porch, and hit Start New Recording, and it will capture the quacks, caws, tweets, squawks, croaks, trills and melodies that any birds in the area happen to be making at the time.

The summer dawn brings a great commotion as many kinds of birds begin to wake up and make their presence known. On the cell phone screen, each is depicted and labeled; I can go to any one and hear its individual song or call isolated from the general din.

So far this month the app has distinguished and listed the voices of the following: American crow, American robin, Canada goose, Philadelphia vireo, red-eyed vireo, warbling vireo, dark-eyed junco, cedar waxwing, European starling, Eastern phoebe, Northern cardinal, chipping sparrow, song sparrow, house wren, pine warbler, yellow warbler, American goldfinch, blue jay, downy woodpecker, common grackle, common yellowthroat, mourning dove, black-capped chickadee, gray catbird and common raven. Robins, catbirds and red-eyed vireos have been by far the most constant and commonplace, until yesterday.

As of yesterday — where is the catbird? Its loud mewing alarm call, sounding from the maze of the cedar hedge every time I stepped out the door, is conspicuous by its absence. I’ve become accustomed to the small gray male, flying from twig to post, watching me warily, probably trying to lead me away from the nest. Until just recently there were several on guard, positioned at various spots around the field, vigilant and vocal, and now they are all gone. No graceful little watchful birds, no gray catbird recordings on my Merlin app.

And what’s with the ravens?

Behind the field, where the AuSable river flows near the foot of Spread Eagle Mountain, ravens have recently taken up residence, or are perhaps visiting an Airbnb. I used to wonder how to tell ravens apart from crows, but now there is no question. Ravens are huge.

They circle and swoop, screaming and croaking (not cawing). They are very loud.

At around 5 a.m. the ravens set up a ruckus, calling back and forth to each other, and then fly away one by one, who knows where.

The ravens first showed up one afternoon about a week ago, circling and shrieking. Why? It was a little unnerving. I read that ravens sometimes behave this way when they have located “a sizable carcass” to scavenge. My research indicates that ravens are either solitary or paired for life, but these birds are apparently flocking and roosting together in a group. Maybe it just seems like more because they’re so noisy and active.

Birds may call and sing at any time, but they make the biggest commotion at sunup and sundown, just like the cowboy heroes in the old westerns. I know two friends, now in their eighties, who were in the same class at the old Keene school. They have a lot in common, including a love of old westerns. A classic trope of these shows is the lone cowboy riding off into the sunset. This looks romantic, but it doesn’t make sense. Before he gets far it will be pitch dark out on the plains, and, far from the saloon and the dance hall, with no streetlights, he will be forced to bed down for the night where some early riser is bound to come across him at sunrise the next morning.

“Hey, Shane, thought you left town.”

‘I’m going, I’m going.”

Like the tumbling tumbleweed.

Birds are so often on my mind now. It’s strange to think that to me, before Merlin, they were just an amorphous part of the background. As the Beatles sang, there were birds all around, but I never saw them winging.

Have a good week.

(Martha Allen lives in Keene Valley. She has been writing for the Lake Placid News for more than 20 years.)