The Bird Line (508-696-7577) would often languish unattended were it not for Happy Spongberg, who always keeps an alert eye open in the productive habitat near her home off Tea Lane in Chilmark. This week, Happy reports not one but two yellow-bellied sapsuckers, an adult male and an immature bird, on the same pine tree. The pair, reports Happy, were climbing in a spiral around the tree “like the stripe on a barbershop pole,” with the adult bird occasionally taking a swipe at the youngster, just to be sure everybody knew who was in charge. Sapsuckers are not exactly rare on the Vineyard, and they do linger into the early winter and sometimes beyond. But they are never common; two in one day is unusual, and two in one tree is the kind of thing that makes one go home, make a cup of tea and feel content.

It’s a good thing February is a short month, because it’s easily the dullest one in the birding year. With the great ponds mostly or entirely frozen, many of our ducks have had to press farther south. Meanwhile, snow storms and cold snaps have pruned the numbers of songbirds, either through mortality or by pushing these birds, too, farther south. A couple of recent outings ranked among the slowest days of birding I can recall.

Mid-April this year looks even less like spring than it usually does on the Vineyard. Although conditions were looking up a bit during the middle of this week, the last few weeks have averaged cloudy and cool. Accordingly, there appears to have been little activity among Island birders, and the migration appears to be running slightly behind schedule. But all this is poised to change.

The Vineyard bird hot line received a fascinating report from Edo Potter, out on Chappy, who noticed a rowdy mob of crows outside her house around dawn last Friday.

The crows were ganging up on something they had pinned to the ground — just what wasn’t clear, but it was large and, when Edo’s husband Bob flushed the crows, it flew off to some nearby bushes.