A half-dozen birdwatchers stood as silently and still as statues one recent winter morning, peering into a black pine grove at Hammonassett Beach State Park.

Word evidently had circulated in the ornithological community that red crossbills were in town.

“OK, let’s be really quiet,” Maggie Jones whispered, holding a finger to her lips while the rest of us crept forward, looking as if we were sneaking past a dozing grizzly.

We not only were trying to avoid scaring off the rarely seen birds, but also didn’t want to annoy the dedicated spectators who watched through binoculars, spotting scopes and camera lenses.

“Crossbills are special visitors brightening the winter,” Maggie noted. So named because their overlapping upper and lower bills can extract tiny seeds, these feathered migrants are among a variety of birds that appear periodically at the 936-acre park in Madison.

“Nearly every year, an avian rarity or two show up here, and I can think of several, including boreal and great gray owls, that I have not seen elsewhere in Connecticut,” she added.

Maggie, director emeritus of the Denison Pequotsepos Nature Center in Mystic, accompanied our small group on a hike of about five miles that included a glimpse of another northern visitor: a harbor seal basking on rocks offshore in Long Island Sound.

At the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic slightly more than a year ago, we confined ourselves to exploring less-visited, out-of-the-way nature preserves and land trust properties. Our group easily abided by social distancing protocols when we’ve been the only hikers on the trail.

In recent weeks, though, we’ve been taking advantage of the off-season to visit isolated beaches — including such popular landmarks as Hammonasset, Connecticut’s largest shoreline park, which attracts more than two million visitors during warm-weather months.

But on this blustery, midweek morning, the park — conveniently located roughly midway along the Connecticut shoreline, and easily accessible via Route 9 and I-95 — was far from deserted. In addition to birdwatchers, we encountered scores of bicyclists, families pushing strollers, and informal walking groups.

No doubt some visitors also decided to take a stroll after lining up for free COVID-19 tests in a mobile clinic near the park entrance. By the end of our hike about noon, the parking lot near the Meigs Point Nature Center was jammed.

The nature center, which offers a variety of summer programs and features a large observation deck, is among the amenities that draw so many people to Hammonasset. The park contains a 550-unit campground, boardwalk, picnic grounds, cartop boat launch, fishing areas, bathhouse, and white-sand beach that extends over much of a two-mile shoreline.

There also are miles of flat-as-a-pancake trails — many of them paved and handicapped-accessible. Compared to weekly outings over the past year, when we often tramped over rocky, hilly, icy and muddy paths, our visit to Hammonasset was literally a walk in the park.

According to the volunteer organization Friends of Hammonasset, the park is named for the Hammonassett tribe of Eastern Woodland Native Americans, one of five tribes that inhabited Connecticut’s shoreline area.

“The word ‘Hammonassett’ means ‘where we dig holes in the ground,’ a reference to the tribe’s agricultural way of life,” the organization notes. “They grew corn, beans, and squash, and fished foraged and hunted as well.”

The Friends of Hammonasset website outlines the property’s history:

Two years after the first colonists arrived in 1639, Uncas, a powerful Mohegan Sachem, married into the tribe, and the area around Hammonasset was given to the Mohegans as part of a marriage dowry. Uncas soon sold the land to Colonel George Fenwick, the leader of the Saybrook Colony, who later traded the land to Henry Whitfield of Guilford for use as farmland. The Hammonassetts relocated to the Niantic River area and were absorbed into the Mohegan Tribe.

Later, sheds were built on Hammonasset Beach to boil down fish into oil for paint and linseed oil, and in 1898 the Winchester Repeating Arms Company bought Hammonasset to use as a testing site for its Lee Straight Pull rifle.

Meanwhile, after the turn of the century, the state became interested in creating a park on the property, and in 1919 spent $130,960 to buy several parcels totaling 565 acres.

Hammonasset Beach State Park opened to the public on July 18, 1920, attracting more than 75,000 its first season. Three years later, the park nearly doubled in size with the acquisition of additional acreage.

The park was closed to the public during World War II, when it served as an army reservation and aircraft firing range for P-47 warplanes that fired at targets set up along Meigs Point Road.

We did not observe any military planes flying the day of our visit — only crossbills, a flock of larks, a red-tailed hawk and marsh hawk, along with the usual assortment of gulls, crows and bluejays.

We also heard one welcome call: The shrill trill of a red-winged blackbird, reminding us that spring, which begins Saturday, is about to fill the air with its rejuvenated chorus.

Our outing included a tour around Willard's Island, a wooded peninsula surrounded by a sea of saltmarsh, winding through groves of red cedar, bayberry, sumac, pear and apple trees — remnants of a former orchard.

We also hiked to a lookout platform on Cedar Island, between the Hammonassett River and Long Island Sound, from which we spotted the lone harbor seal.

Soon, this marine mammal, like the crossbills, will return north, and Hammonasset will be increasingly populated with human visitors.

With the temperatures warming, vaccination rates increasing and the virus’s deadly grip loosening, our lives may finally be edging toward “normal.”

Let’s hope this re-emergence will be as gradual as the start of spring — a slow stirring rather than a sudden jolt — so we don’t find ourselves plunged back into a crippling pandemic.