The shore birds appear in new flocks all the time, skimming and crying along a once empty shore. Colorful little warblers populate the woods, each with so mature and particular a color and set of ways. Now, I think, they are all back from Mexico or Florida or Patagonia, to help us not only in our geography but to extend our senses. Motion and change of place are a bird’s necessity. Wings insist on flight. Yet their recognition of that part of the land or length of shore they come to in spring seems as positive as that of any home builder on a numbered lot. When they arrive, a large majority claim a place with all the resources at their command. In the science of ornithology this is called “territorialism.” Male birds, which often arrive some days or weeks before the females, select an area of land as a nesting site, which they defend against all intruders. Most of the songs of spring are advertisements by male birds of the fact of land possession. The towhees are more insistent and vociferous in their claiming than most. I hear two males, both perched on low trees, perhaps a hundred yards apart, that keep at their singing as if they had a rivalry that would never end. Each declares. Each holds its own, as if song is an anchor to the earth. They stop me in my tracks. A human being is a clumsy, noisy, obstreperous animal. When I walk down a slope or through the level fields, I find myself so involved with my own racket as to lose all sense of what it was I set out to look for. Where is peace if you yourself destroy it? These birds help me to command it. I stop and listen to them, squaring off the limits they declare. “Air_tree_!” the towhees call, and “Tip-your-_tree_!” continually, inexhaustibly. There is probably little point in using words like pride, challenge, or anticipation in terms of these singers. Who in the nonhuman world knows but they? Our music is not theirs, however much we have borrowed from them. Still, what I catch at, and what starts in me, is feeling. Their songs are an expression of it. The towhees are here to establish themselves. Their future is in direct relation to the place they have chosen for it, which may also be the general area where they were born. Their voices measure place, a real and powerful thing to them. Song insists. Song makes known. Song is a self-assurance. Since this singing is done in collaboration with the arousing, fecund world of spring, it may in its own way be true awareness.