ALWAYS IN SEASON: That must be winter -- dead ahead

We've reached that season when winter is no longer just around the corner, but rather straight ahead.

Snow this week, maybe.

Cold and snowy winter, probably.

That's what the forecasts say.

And so last week, I found myself playing a game that might be called "good sign/bad sign."

Good sign: Lots of juncos all around.

Bad sign: Many fewer juncos by the end of the week.

Good sign: Snow geese aren't down in big numbers yet.

Bad sign: Snow geese have begun passing overhead.

Good sign: Blue jays haven't been seen at the feeders.

Bad sign: A blue jay showed up in the yard Saturday.

Good sign: Lots of hawks still in open country. northern harriers especially.

Bad sign: Rough-legged hawks on power poles.

And so on.

Of course, the birds don't really predict the weather. Instead, they reflect conditions as they are. We've had an unusually long spell of bright blue weather this October. As a result, farmers have pretty much finished the harvest -- a good thing for them, but a mixed blessing for the birds.

For open-country hawks, the early harvest provides a bonanza because it means an abundance of prey species without much cover.

Northern harriers are birds of wet meadows. Many of these have been cut for hay, exposing the insects and small mammals that the harriers devour.

Similarly, the bare fields make good hunting, and not just for harriers but for other open country hawks, as well.

Red-tailed hawks are still the most numerous of the larger hawks in open country, but they will move farther south as winter advances. Watch for soaring flocks of them -- called kettles -- on days when the temperature rises. This creates thermals of rising air that lift the birds and push them south.

At the same time, numbers of rough-legged hawks will begin to increase locally. This is the great hawk of the tundra, a big, beautiful bird, perhaps the most striking of all the hawks that occur here. Early November is the season for rough-legged hawks. Some years, they occur in large numbers, feasting on mice and meadow voles. If the winter is open, exposing prey, the hawks will stay well into December, and sometimes longer.

But heavy snowfall pushes them south. They depend on open ground for hunting success.

As for geese: Small flocks of snow geese have been passing over the Red River Valley for several weeks, but the enormous flocks that so excite hunters have yet to arrive. They move with the intense low-pressure areas that usher in winter in our area.

Likewise the swans. Suezette and I saw swans as we drove to Bismarck last week. Central North Dakota is a major staging area for tundra swans (called whistling swans in older bird books). Large flocks of these magnificent birds will hang around, again until low pressure drives them south and east, to the areas around Chesapeake Bay.

Blue jays are reliable harbingers of harsher weather. No other species is quite so secretive during the breeding season and yet so obvious in fall and winter.

There is nothing secretive about dark-eyed juncos, by contrast, at least not in their visits here.

Hosts -- that seems the appropriate word -- of juncos (the slate-colored form, mostly) pass through the Red River Valley each spring and fall, and ornithologists assure us that they are equally abundant elsewhere in the northern states.

Juncos nest a bit farther south than rough-legged hawks, pretty much throughout the scrub forest belt of the Canadian Shield, reaching northeastern Minnesota.

But with us, they are strictly -- or almost strictly -- birds of passage.

Despite their absence in summertime, juncos are among the most abundant birds in our area during the fall, when they can be encountered almost everywhere that offers even a little bit of cover. They've been numerous along the Red River Greenway for several weeks -- more numerous earlier than now.

For a couple of weeks, I was entertained by hundreds of juncos at my place west of Gilby, N.D. But there were more juncos a week ago than there are now -- a bad sign, perhaps.

But juncos are tough birds. They occur on almost every Christmas bird count in our area almost every year.

Only heavy snow discourages these individuals. As ground feeders, they depend on open areas to forage.

e Jacobs is editor and publisher of the Herald.