May in Massachusetts is one of the best times of the year to enjoy birds. Sparrows, swallows, swifts, wood warblers, hummingbirds and orioles are all flying in to make nests, attract mates and raise babies before flying south again in the fall.
If you have ever seen a bird and wondered what it was or wanted to know more about it, a great resource to check out is All About Birds, a free website put together by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. For comprehensive information on a given species, you’ll want to use Birds of the World, also from Cornell Lab. Birds of the World contains full life histories of all the world’s birds and includes range maps, color illustrations, and fantastic media galleries. Birds of the World is available to anyone in the library and to Andover library card holders from home. Visit https://mhl.org/birds to check it out!
Also be sure to register for Experience Spring Bird Migration to the Fullest via Zoom on Monday, May 12th from 7 to 8 pm, when Heather Wolf, author of Find More Birds: 111 Surprising Ways to Spot Birds Wherever You Are, will talk about spring bird migration.
This month’s crossword is a follow-up to one we published in April 2023 called This Puzzle Has Birds in It, which has been loaded more than any other crossword we’ve put out. (January 2024’s Snow Big Deal is a very close second.) For more bird-related crosswords, see Pro Birds and the untitled May 2020 crossword.