In the northeast spring is in a hurry.

For a few weeks the season's moment-by-moment explosions of renascence have buffeted my senses; the input goes straight to my heart and bypasses any application of language.

Last week one ruby-throated hummingbird returned. I saw him lilting from blossom to blossom at the peach tree and hurried to make nectar and fill the feeders.

Yesterday morning I found one of the feeders on the ground, the previous day’s wind having blown it off its hook. I brought it in and cleaned it and while the fresh nectar was cooling I went outdoors. One of the little guys buzzed around the corner of the house and stopped three feet from me, hovered, glaring: “Where is it!?!?”

The lilacs have been budded for a couple of weeks, and their fervor apparently demands that they ignore the rules: One branch of the dark purple lilacs is blooming pale blossoms.

On the day of the hummingbirds’ return I heard the bobolinks’ techno-music call for the first time this season. I can discern no repetition in their calls, but know them by the bubbling metallic twang.

F. Schuyler Mathews’ Field Book of Wild Birds and their Music describes it perfectly as “…a mad, reckless song-fantasia, an outbreak of pent-up, irrepressible glee." Bobolinks will be here only for the length of time it takes to nest and get the chicks flying and then clear out again before the first haying.

I need to get back outdoors to bask in all this glory.