Crow blackbirds have arrived on Island. They run and hop around the yard and fields holding their head and keel-shaped tails high. In the right light the feathers on their heads and necks are an iridescent purple-blue and their backs bronzy. I am used to these common grackles arriving around St. Patrick’s Day or the Ides of March. The grackles have a different idea.

The birding community was saddened to hear of the death of Julian Robinson. His photographs, poems and love of sharing them with young and old alike will be sorely missed. I hope Rob Bierregaard will name the next male osprey that he fits with a transmitter Julian.

There has been a good deal of talk about crows recently, so I thought I would put my oar in. There probably have been fish crows on the Island for several years, but to tell the fish crows from American crows is tough. Recently I met up with Alvaro Jaramillo, who is a bird tour operator and author of books and articles about birds in bird magazines. We were talking about tough ID problems (gulls) and I mentioned the crow problem. He said that he had written a piece recently on the subject in Bird Watcher’s Digest. I immediately dug up that issue and will do my best to summarize what Alvaro had to say, as it was the best comparison I have seen so far.

Approximately 1,500 crows roost at the land bank’s Tradewinds Preserve off County Road in Oak Bluffs. This roost was noted this winter as a result of the recent Christmas Bird Count; Tom Chase’s field team counted these crows and found the second confirmed sighting of fish crows on the Island. Allan Keith’s field team could not find last year’s roost of crows off North Road in Chilmark, which included the first confirmed sighting of fish crows on the Island.

Adam deBettencourt sent us this e-mail while we were attending the festival in Florida: “I have observed what appears to be a conjunctivitis infection in both a male house finch and male American goldfinch that have been visiting my feeder in Chilmark. Has this been noted elsewhere on the Island? I have done some reading and research on the subject and am wondering if there is anything else I should do besides cleaning my feeders and feeding stations? Is there a risk of this infection being passed to other species that visit my feeder?”

We ran away. The reason was the 15th annual Space Coast Birding and Wildlife Festival in Titusville, Fla. Now, Flip likes to look for birds, but fishing is his real passion. So when we first heard about this festival 16 years ago, run by a female commercial fishing boat captain, I had no problem convincing Flip to attend.