This late May morning, before the sunrise, the world is clothed in birds. They swoop, argue in the brush, sing and chatter. They are everywhere in sound and flight.

Above my study, under the second-floor eave of the house, for the fifth year a pair of barn swallows raises out its noisy brood. The parents forage nonstop. Upon their return, they rest on a telephone wire forty feet out from the nest, before diving in to drop a beetle into waiting mouths.

Throughout the various barns and outbuildings of the farm, countless other pairs are likewise nested. Together they provide one of my great delights, as they follow the tractor, swooping in elegant patterns, for unlucky and outmaneuvered insects.

At one end of the front porch, a pair of house sparrows nests in a birdhouse Cindy created. On the other, a duo of cardinals has made a home in the crape myrtle, while further out, mockingbirds nest in the muscadine vines.

This season also brings us brown thrashers, bluebirds, blue jays, hummingbirds, with their magnificently constructed nests in the apple trees, mourning doves among the crabapples, bobwhites calling from the overgrown fenceline. And then there are the countless others that only Cindy recognizes: “Oh, my gosh! Out back, up by the blueberries, those are indigo buntings — the first ones I’ve ever seen!” “Look, out the window, quick! It’s … an American goldfinch, a pileated woodpecker, an Eastern kingbird, a Cooper’s hawk. Too late, it’s gone,” she says, both sad and pleased for having witnessed its presence.

Each spring morning, after an hour or two of owning this time, my daily ritual ends. The sun pushes aside the songsters’ trilling and chirping to take up its own dominion. In a sleight-of-hand, the intensity from the early morning is diminished, as if the sun exercises some curious power, by illumination alone, over this sound, moving the birdsong to the background.