This is a dark-eyed junco.

It’s a perfectly nice bird, and it doesn’t at all deserve the feelings I have for it.  In Boston, juncos are winter residents, coming south from their more-northerly breeding grounds for the milder winters and plentiful feeders. They start singing their breeding song shortly before they make the return trip north and are usually gone by mid April.  The problem is that their disappearance times closely with the due date for personal income tax returns, and they begin singing about a week earlier, as if to taunt the procrastinators in the human populace about the upcoming deadline.  I now have to finish my tax preparations by the beginning of March to meet the corporate filing deadline, but I still feel an upwelling of anxiety whenever I hear singing juncos.