Meg and Victor Atkins were doing a lot of smiling as they walked along Alna’s Head Tide Road on April 18. They have walked the same stretch of road every morning they could for about 40 years. On Saturday, with binoculars and attentive ears, they struck nature lovers’ gold.

“The birds are popping,” Meg Atkins said. “We’ve been so lucky. Yesterday, there was a ruby-crowned kinglet, and this morning, just by the dam, five tufted titmice. They looked as if they were checking each other out.”

The Newburyport, Massachusetts couple walk to the Head Tide area from the home Joe Barth built them decades ago.

In the couple’s early years of trips to their Alna home, their children were young so there was less time for the walks up the road; now the couple are retired and enjoying every opportunity to take in the diversity they said exists near that part of the Sheepscot River.

Birds are believed to be attracted to spots with small bridges, like the bridge near Head Tide Dam, Victor Atkins said. And the variety of trees there attracts diverse species of birds, they said. When a reporter caught up with them on Saturday’s walk, husband and wife identified one bird after another, by its look, song or call.

They consider themselves naturalists more than bird watchers, Victor Atkins said. In Massachusetts they serve as Audubon field teachers, meeting with school groups.

Just as the couple were glad to be done with a winter that brought them nine feet of snow in Massachusetts, they said the birds in Alna were finally getting a spring that was late in coming. The frozen ground had made it hard for the birds to get at the bugs they eat, Meg Atkins said.

“They were hungry,” her husband said.