Your Armchair Birder is back from Asheville, North Carolina, and a book signing at Malaprops Bookstore & Café, the laid-back hangout where native Ashevillians chill with their lattes and lit. I talked about my book to a dozen or 15 enthusiasts, one of whom threw me a bit off stride by asking why I hadn’t been on the birdwalk that morning just a little way out of town on the Blue Ridge Parkway. “We saw 11 kinds of warblers,” she told me, and proceeded to start listing: Kentucky, hooded, blackburnian, yellow-throated, American redstart, black-throated blue, cerulean (yes! cerulean)–I mean, it went on and on.

I had to tell her, “Whoa, whoa. Who wants to be on a fragrant mountainside looking at 11 kinds of warblers when they can be in the line of cattle being prodded from room to room in the Biltmore House?”

But Dede and I loved Asheville–and Malaprops. May the independent bookstore not merely endure, but prevail.

Back home, the chickadees that took over the bluebird house are beginning to feed their just-hatched young, and the phoebes that have returned, once again, to the beam under the eave of the front porch must be very close to the end of incubation. (Last year–and it couldn’t have been more than a day or two before fledging–a big milksnake gobbled up the babies. This year I hope to be more vigilant, though I don’t know how.)

Then, yesterday evening, I heard the distinctive chick-burr, chick-burr, and looked just off the porch to see, on the limb of a pine tree surprisingly close to the ground, that most spectacular sign of summertime in my own lovely woods–the gorgeous scarlet tanager.

So to heck with 11 kinds of warblers.