In recent weeks we have been hovering near the seasonal tipping point. A stretch of days will blow in from somewhere south of us, bringing warmer air, and deploying a bluer shade of sky, as the fulcrum tilts us more towards the spring. Winter, meanwhile, goes into a temporary retreat and bides its time. I don’t think we have seen the last of winter yet.

Robins have reappeared from wherever it is that robins go while the rest of us are hunkering at fireside through long, dark winter nights. In the garden yesterday the air was loud with robin chatter as they began their spring campaign, skirmishing with each other for territory in which to build a nest and raise a brood. Each seemed indignant as they staked out their conflicting claims, calling on the world to come to their assistance in fending off competing claimants and interlopers.

A gang of red-headed sapsuckers is also settling in somewhere nearby for the season. I spotted four of them together recently, plotting stategy. One of them — their leader, I expect — has developed an annoying habit at sunrise. Like clockwork in the early dawn he takes his perch at the pinnacle of the telephone pole across the street, where, as if in response to the downbeat of some cosmic conductor’s baton, he begins each morning with a rat-a-tattoo on the metal cap which tops the pole.

There are certain qualities to this sound which enable it to penetrate my deepest, pre-alarm sleep, and I have grown to resent his choice of such an early hour for music practice. Timing aside, I can see no sense in his activity: surely he cannot expect to pierce that metal cap. And yet he drums on, morning after morning, with a monomaniacal persistance that suggests he will not easily be dissuaded. Since I cannot reason with him I’ve been considering an armed response, flipping through the Lee Valley catalog in search of a slingshot I saw advertised there once.

It’s not just the choice of instrument that he and I are in disagreement on; I have trees to protect as well. Several of our trees still bear the scars of sapsucker attention from other years: neat rows of puncture-holes around the trunks at various heights. One of the birches was particularly victimized, the top a pale, leafless shadow of its neighbors’. Last Sunday I spotted one sapsucker gang member on our mountain ash, not five feet away from where I stood. He was pounding his beak against the bark quite insolently. “Hey!” I shouted. “Shoo! Away!”, and shook a fist. He pounded on, and took flight only when I hurled a length of firewood past his ear.

I fear, though, this is a battle that I cannot win. I can mount a weekend guard reasonably well, but week days are another matter. While I work, so will he, and he doesn’t seem to need a coffee break.