The first 12 days of May are the birding equivalent of the Twelve Days of Christmas. May delivers colorfully plumaged avian gifts — daily. Instead of a pear tree offering a partridge, two turtledoves and three French hens, my cedar tree produced four calling birds one morning.

For birders, May airwaves are filled with songs of the ruby-crowned kinglet, yellow-rumped warbler, palm warbler, common yellowthroat, white-crowned sparrow, solitary sandpiper and many other migrants. Each bird is stunningly handsome, sporting bright new feathers of red, yellow, auburn, black, gray and white.

Here are a few fun facts on each species, courtesy of Cornell University's fabulous website.

Ruby-crowned kinglet

Ruby-crowned kinglets are hyperactive olive-green birds, smaller than chickadees and slightly larger than hummingbirds. A favorite among birders, kinglets are tiny birds with very big voices. The "ruby crown" of the male is usually hidden - your best chance to see it is to find an excited male singing in spring or summer.

For a bird that weighs the equivalent of several pennies, female kinglets lay a very large clutch of eggs, up to 12 in a single nest. Although the eggs themselves weigh only about a fiftieth of an ounce, an entire clutch can weigh as much as the female herself.

Most migrate to the southern and southwestern United States and Mexico for the winter. Ruby-crowned kinglets are most often found in spruce-fir forests in the northwestern United States and Canada.

Listen to the ruby-crowned kinglet’s song

Yellow-rumped warbler

Yellow-rumped warblers are appropriately named. This fairly large, full-bodied warbler has a distinct yellow patch on its rump, earning it the nickname of butter-butt. A typical conversation among birders follows: "What did you see this morning?" one birder asks. "I saw several butter-butts and a TV." TV is short for turkey vulture.

Yellow-rumped warblers are very active foragers, often "hawking" insects in the outer tree canopies. They're often seen sallying out to catch airborne insects in midair, beating their wings in one spot like a hummingbird.

This warbler is unique in its ability to digest the waxes found in bayberries and wax myrtles. So fond of myrtle bushes, early naturalists named the bird Myrtle warbler. Its ability to consume fruits allows this bird to winter farther north than other warblers. Christmas bird counts in coastal Maine often includes a few yellow-rumped warblers.

Listen to the yellow-rumped warbler’s song

Palm warbler

Palm warblers are among the earliest warblers to return each spring to Midcoast Maine. They are easily recognizable by their yellow color, rusty cap and tail-wagging habit, reminiscent of the common eastern phoebe. Despite its tropical name, palm warblers live farther north than most other warblers. It breeds far to the north in Canada. In Maine, this bird nests in open black spruce sphagnum bogs. It winters primarily in the southern United States and Caribbean, where they were first named after being observed flitting among palm trees.

I've discovered a few palm warbler nests at the base of black spruce trees on a quaking bog near Bigelow Mountain. Their ground nests are a beautiful open cup of cotton grass stalks, shredded cedar bark, rootlets and wood ferns, and lined with fine sedges and moose hair.

Listen to the palm warbler’s song

Common yellowthroat

From the Cornell University website: "A broad black mask lends a touch of highwayman's mystique to the male common wellowthroat." Look for these furtive, yellow and olive "lone ranger" look a-likes skulking through tangled vegetation, often in cattails at the edges of marshes and wetlands. Females lack the mask and are much browner, though they usually show a hint of warm yellow at the throat. Yellowthroats are vocal birds; with a charming witchety-witchety-witchety song and sharp distinctive chuck call notes.

The Common yellowthroat was one of the first bird species to be catalogued in the New World. Linnaeus described a Maryland specimen in 1766.

Each male yellowthroat has only one mate in his territory during a breeding season. However, a female's mating calls often attract other males, and she may mate with them behind her mate's back. DNA from unfledged young in one nest revealed that their mother breed with at least three different adult males. Biologically this makes perfect sense because she can't afford to squander a breeding season with a male that might be infertile, impotent or harbor inferior genes.

Brown-headed cowbirds often lay their eggs in the nests of common yellowthroats. This is called brood parasitism, and it's detrimental to the yellowthroats. However, yellowthroats, unlike other birds parasitized by cowbirds, recognize the foreign cowbird eggs. They'll either desert a nest if it contains a cowbird egg or build a second or even a third nest on top of a parasitized nest.

Listen to the common yellowthroat’s song

Solitary sandpiper

During this morning's walk on Beauchamp Point, a solitary sandpiper greeted me with a lovely alarm call from the edge of a vernal pool where it had been feeding on wood frog tadpoles. Solitary sandpipers are most commonly seen during migration along the banks of ponds and creeks. While not truly solitary, the species does not migrate in large flocks the way other shorebirds do.

Of the world's 85 sandpiper species, only the solitary sandpiper and the green sandpiper of Eurasia routinely lay eggs in tree nests instead of on the ground. Had I known this factoid in 1999, it would have saved me many hours of looking for a solitary sandpiper nest near the St. John River in June 1999. That spring an adult female solitary sandpiper lured me from its nest by feigning a broken wing, a trick commonly deployed by nesting killdeer. Solitary sandpipers lay their eggs in the tree nests of several different songbirds, particularly those of the American robin, rusty blackbird, eastern kingbird, gray jay and cedar waxwing.

Listen to the solitary sandpiper’s song

White-crowned sparrow

White-crowned sparrows appear each spring in the Midcoast to grace our gardens and favorite conservation lands. With a scholarly-looking black-and-white head, pale beak and crisp gray breast, this dashing sparrow is easily identifiable by sight, unlike many other sparrows. Watch for flocks of these sparrows scurrying through brushy borders and overgrown fields, or coax them into the open with backyard feeders.

From now until the end of May, listen for this bird's thin, sweet whistle. Enjoy this sparrow while you can because by early June they'll be nesting on the tundra among polar bears in northern Canada.

Because male white-crowned sparrows learn the songs they grew up with and do not travel far from where they were raised, song dialects frequently form. Males on the edge of two dialects may be bilingual and able to sing both dialects.

Listed to the white-crowned sparrow’s song

Incidentally, on last check, there are at least six geese a layin' in nearby Megunticook Lake.

Ron Joseph is a retired Maine wildlife biologist. He lives in Camden.