RITTER SPRINGS PARK — Charley had birded hard all week, and Lisa isn’t a morning person anyway, so we didn’t get started till 8 a.m. A couple new to Springfield — Herb and Renee — had come out to join us. Two Yellow-throated Vireos sang during our introductions.

Swainson’s Thrushes were everywhere. I glimpsed a Kentucky Warbler briefly. Lisa thought one singing vireo was a Philadelphia, but we couldn’t ever see it.

We headed down the gravel road toward the pavilion on foot. Early morning’s thin clouds cleared quickly, and the sun began to warm the treetops. A first-year redstart sang with gusto but — blotched with black and lacking bright colors — looked kind of pitiful. I caught a female Chestnut-sided Warbler moving high and fast and showed her to Charley. He need her for his Missouri year list, so he thanked me and said, “Now, I need a blackburnian and a bay-breasted.” Thankfully, such unmitigated greed is only a front. At heart, he’s a birder, not a ticker.

A Wilson’s Warbler and a Common Yellowthroat skulked low. Lisa turned her attention to the treetops, searching for a singing oriole. She raised her voice: “Well that’s a … bllaaub … ddyahhh … flycatcher! … mahhh … up there!”

“Up there” in a dead treetop was a preening Olive-sided Flycatcher. Its back was turned to us, and the puffy white tufts on its sides gleamed brightly in the sun.

After a nice long look, we engaged in the obligatory ridicule of Lisa’s weird vocalizations. Then Charley and Lisa reminisced about Olive-sided Flycatchers seen on previous trips. I don’t think I’d seen one since Jason and I went to the Rio Grande Valley in 2001, but perhaps I’d just forgotten.

The rest of the walk was pleasant if unremarkable. The overnight rain had not produced a warbler fallout, but we did encounter a few species. We saw a few parulas, and Lisa and I heard a Blue-winged Warbler. We saw two singing Magnolia Warblers. If I ever knew their song, I’d forgotten, and Lisa had to teach it to me again. Charley and Lisa got a quick look at a Mourning Warbler, but all I really saw was movement.

Least and Acadian flycatchers sang, and a Barred Owl called from down near the river. Towhees were abundant, and I saw a newly fledged, almost tailless cardinal crashing around in a bush.

Back at the cars, we sat chatting with Renee and Herb. A small bird in the brush caught my attention. It was brown and streaky with touches of yellow. “Yellow-rump,” I said, even though I knew it wasn’t. Nothing about the little warbler made sense to me — fine streaks, yellowish throat. The others saw her briefly before she flitted on her way. “Palm?”

Lisa didn’t think it was a palm, but no one offered any other suggestions. Charley got his Sibley, and we thumbed through the pages for a couple of minutes. Not palm … not pine … not blackburnian … not supposed to happen to birders like us.

It was a female Cape May Warbler. That’s a good bird for southwest Missouri, and we should have been excited. But the quick, casual look at the bird and our inexcusable consternation over its identity left us more confused than excited.

WEST CENTRAL MISSOURI — Black-bellied Plovers, at least a dozen of them, were clad in a variety of blacks, grays, and whites. Four stately Whimbrels rested quietly amid the dowitchers, which moved quickly and kept probing the mud with their rod-like bills.

A few Stilt Sandpipers, beginning to show traces of their rusty cheeks and dark-barred bellies, stuck together on the edges of the dowitcher crowd. A colorful Hudsonian Godwit wandered freely in and out of the fray. Two White-rumped Sandpipers — sides marked clearly with dark chevrons — hung back with the Stilt Sandpipers.

Though feeding, resting, and preening just then, all of them were driven relentlessly north by the very power that gave them life. Some were bound for the fringes of the continent — patches of tundra above the Arctic Circle where the summers are short and the world is unforgiving. They are compelled to fly, fly, fly and then to breed. The ritual is simple and ancient. They are participants in the great dance of this wild, untamable world. Their own existence is fleeting, but there were others before them, and there will be others afterward.

And there, on that sunny afternoon, we crossed their path. We saw them in the shallow water, driven to the ground by hunger, or exhaustion, or a storm, but soon they would be back in the sky pushing northward, ever northward.

Lisa’s choice of Schell-Osage Conservation Area demonstrated once again her remarkable ability to sense the “bird force,” as she and Charley call it. Finding good shorebirds in our area is very difficult because habitat is scarce and ephemeral. Fields and marshes are often either too wet or too dry (or just empty of birds), but today was perfect.

In addition to the shorebirds, dozens and dozens of Black Terns skimmed the lake and rested on the flats. A lone Common Tern was with them, and we had good looks at its deep reed bill and dark flight feathers.

Throughout the refuge, willows swarmed with Cedar Waxwings — hundreds of them. Redstarts, yellowthroats, Warbling Vireos, Yellow Warblers, catbirds, Yellow-billed Cuckoos, and Indigo Buntings sang. A Black-billed Cuckoo flew across the road and stayed out on the edge of the trees long enough for us to see it very well.

After Schell, we stopped by a prairie near Taberville because I wanted to see a Henslow’s Sparrow. We parked and started down a path mowed through the prairie. We saw a drab little Ammodramous-type sparrow singing a very high, tinkling song. Lisa and I had heard the song earlier in the day and been perplexed. It was a Grasshopper Sparrow’s secondary song, which neither of us had heard before.

The Henslow’s were exceedingly uncooperative. Walking through the grasses, we flushed several of the mouse-like birds but never got looks at them. They sang all over the prairie, but the songs never got any closer as we approached them.

We started back up the hill toward the parking lot and met a small, boyish man with a clipboard and some little flags in his hands. He explained that he was researching prairie mole crickets.

With Dickcissels’ songs ringing in our ears, we got in the Jeep and headed home.

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