I was lying in my bed this morning, more accustomed to the distant din of traffic than anything that would set my heart aflutter (I know. People don’t say “aflutter” in the real world, but excesses have to be allowed in the spring) when I heard a series of loud, melodic sounds outside my window.

Still floating in the netherworld between wakefulness and sleep, all that my mind could register was one word: Warble. Over and over again. Warble. Warble. Warble. My eyes popped open. Suddenly, it dawned on me. “That’s a bird!”

Then, a big smile suffused (another elaborate spring word) my face, and I thought, “A bird is warbling. The sound it is making literally is a warble. A few hundred years ago, someone strolling through a forest heard that birdsong and strung together a perfect sequence of syllables to describe it.”

Warble. Brilliant. Which got me thinking in general about people, words, and spring.

There is a chickadee at my birdfeeder this very ... I was going to say “moment,” but it just caught my eye and indignantly flew away. If a conspiracy of circumstances had forced me to come up with a name for that indignant bird, with my flat-footed imagination, I would probably have called it, “little black and white bird.”

Which conveys nothing of its perky prettiness or its rapid mid-air reversals when it decides to go thither instead of yon (Alas. Spring has hypnotized me into thinking that I’m a Victorian novelist). “Chickadee,” however, like “warble,” is a perfect word. And that sweet little avitiatrix outside my window ... yes. She’s come back. She sounds like a chickadee should sound, and she looks like a chickadee should look.

Amazing! Which nimble-minded naturalist thought it up?

Was it a farmer with the soul of a poet? A housewife as she gazed out the window over her kitchen sink? A keen-eyed hiker with knobby knees and a lyrical heart? A hobo? A biologist? A birdwatcher? A child?

Words, particularly those that describe nature, are not only suggestive. Often they are accurate as well. Think of “goose.” A goose sounds and looks like ... well, a goose. It’s a plump and squashy fellow that one can well imagine surrounded by glazed carrots and drowning in fat.

Let’s consider other suggestive appellations. First, the ugly ones:

Turkey. A gutteral utterance that aptly describes an unimaginably unattractive (if savory) fowl.

Crow. A nasty biped accurately cast to play the villain in Alfred Hitchcock’s movie, The Birds.

Raven. As dark and menacing as the ceaseless tapping, tapping outside Edgar Allan Poe’s chamber door in the poem of the same name.

Vulture. Need I say more?

Now, we come to the beauties. Beautiful to our eyes and evocative to our ears.

Barn Swallow: Graceful, sleek, and inclined to good-natured chitchat.

Tufted Titmouse. Adorable! He even has a little pointed tuft of feathers on his little pointed head.