KINGfishers with nothing to prove.

A good friend moved from Florida to go back home where the birds that he knows live. I get that. Birds define habitats by their sounds, and colors. I've been a birdwatcher for as long as I can remember. Whenever I changed habitats, I discovered birds for the first time. On Cape Cod, I was awed by the elegance of prehistoric herons in flight. I learned that Ospreys nesting on the towers had made a comeback from near extinction. Songbirds in my backyard woke me early in the morning, summer, spring, and fall. Winter fell silent when the birds took off on the Atlantic Flyway. These days, I live on their flight path.

While I have been recovering from a medical procedure, nothing has been better than sitting with binoculars to welcome back my feathered friends. While summer lingers in Northeast Florida, I sometimes forget that back home the seasons are turning. The first few years that I lived here, I had to check the calendar to see which month it was. October was sweater weather in my mind, but I was still swimming in the pool. Since acclimating to these longer seasons, I look to the birds to tell me the time of year. Kingfishers are the colorful harbingers of all those other birds soon to follow.

Arriving from as far away as my grandparents' homeland, they crossed the border between Canada and the US, tariff free! Nobody could catch 'em or detain them for doing what Kingfishers do, naturally. Wish that it were so for those currently stopped from moving freely in the "land of the free".

Used to be that crossing the Canadian border, without a passport, at the drop of a hat to camp in "Novy" (Nova Scotia) was popular. A drive up for Canadian Thanksgiving (October 13), during peak foliage season through rural Vermont and back down through rugged Maine, was a weekend thing. Not so long ago, my daughter's high school French class spent the week in Old Quebec at the iconic Chateau Frontenac. No questions asked.

"Snowbirds"(folks from Canada) used to come and go from the Great White North to winter here in Sunny Florida. Their absence is noticeable, not only economically, but culturally. Maybe it is my heritage speaking, but I can spot a Canadian in a crowd! It is like spotting that red-headed woodpecker flitting from tree to tree by its distinctive calling card.

On one side of my townhouse is a river where the Kingfishers, Ospreys, Blue and White Herons and Roseate Spoonbills soar high and low, sharing the fishing grounds on the changing tides. Above it all flies the American Eagle, "national bird" of the US. Notable by its size, but mostly identifiable by the way it makes time crossing the river with just a few flaps of those eight-foot wings, like none other. One so mighty does not have to show off its might to the one named KINGfisher, her rat-a-ta-tat call that says she is hanging around here for a while. They co-exist, along with all the varieties of blue, red, brown, black and white.

Living on the Atlantic Flyway is like waiting for the world to come to you. When it becomes frosty in the early mornings, my favorite of all will appear magically one day gliding on the river. White pelicans look like swans passing by. At high noon, they can be seen soaring majestically up and up on the thermals like angels with silver wings. They stop over on the way to their breeding grounds on the Southern border where they are free to come and go, as they please.

Wish that it were so . . .