For the past few days, we’ve been delighted to hear the jubilant song of a black-and-white warbler.

The ringing “we-see-we-see-we-see-we-see” would hardly be considered a song to the uninitiated, and fewer still would probably call this particular iteration “jubilant.”

Perhaps we are anthropomorphizing, imagining that the excitement this little fella is experiencing is because he gets another go at a nest.

You see, as June slides into July and July creeps toward August, bird song generally becomes less frequent. The dawn chorus that we come to enjoy (and expect to wake us as the sun begins to rise) drops off from a bubbling, singing stew of thrushes, warblers, and sparrows to a few persistent songsters.

The singing is replaced with feeding the young in the nest and soon, the newly fledged. No more need to attract a mate, the brood has arrived; no more need to defend the territory, the other males are busy discovering the exhaustion of fatherhood themselves.

Some birds do have more than one brood per breeding season — robins, for example. In fact, they can have not one, not two, but three broods! This explains why their cheery song often continues through summer, including around our house, sometimes at three-thirty in the morning! Gray Catbird is another 1 to 3 brooder, and our yard can attest to it. We continue to wake to the rambling, squeaking, whistling song of this feisty, familiar species. And we’ve been hearing them elsewhere as well, and seeing them zip across the road in front of us wherever we travel through areas of their preferred habitat of dense shrubs and young trees, perhaps chasing off intruders. However, despite multiple broods, only 40 percent of their nests are successful.

Which brings us to the second reason some birds kick it back up, vocally, later in the summer. Their nest may have failed and so the couple is giving it another go. Sometimes they have “divorced” their former mate and moved on to start fresh with a new territory and new mate; for others, they remain in the same place with the same mate but are hoping Mother Nature is kinder and gentler this time around.

Then there are the bachelors. These could be males that were not successful at attracting a mate earlier in the season and their hormones have refused to give up. If the singing’s resurged closer to autumn and perhaps sounds a bit clumsy, it could even be a male born that summer trying his hand at song.

We like to imagine the black-and-white warbler we’ve been hearing lately as an excited first-time parent, preparing for the arrival of his youngins. If the enthusiasm in his voice is any indication, he may even actually believe that if he persists, his offspring will not only hear him but will actually pay attention!

Dr. Jeff Wells is the senior scientist for the Boreal Songbird Initiative. During his time at the famed Cornell Lab of Ornithology and as the Audubon Society's national bird conservation director, Dr. Wells earned a reputation as one of the nation's leading bird experts and conservation biologists. Jeff's grandfather, the late John Chase, was a columnist for the Boothbay Register for many years. Allison Childs Wells, also formerly of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, is a widely published natural history writer and a senior director at the Natural Resources Council of Maine. Together, they have been writing and teaching people about birds for decades. The Maine natives are authors of the highly acclaimed book, Maine's Favorite Birds.