Tag: Migration

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Global Big Day

Here in the Northeast of North America, the first few weeks of May means migration, a brief time when birders’ hearts beat as fast as the tinosaurs we seek. We await spectacular fallouts of passerines headed for their breeding ranges; some few stop here to settle down and seek a mate, finding the habitat suitable enough. Warblers come and go in crisp breeding colors, less “Sunday best,” more “Saturday night fever.”

It’s a time to play hooky, grab your bins, and spend hours staring at the tops of the trees. A wide variety of bird families–not just Parulidae–are representing now. Birds like this Rose-breasted Grosbeak:

RBGB near Sekdin Island, May3, 2021

Between the broad-ranging, long-term effects of climate change, and the near term ravages of PD, you never can tell how many more spring migrations you will get, so make each one count. And speaking of counting, get out there with some (masked and vaccinated) buddies and submit your lists this Saturday (May 8)!

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Fall on Me

Fall is almost here and it couldn’t come sooner for the BwP crew. This year’s covid-mandated isolation plus an associated reluctance to go anywhere, on top of the annual June-August doldrums, a regular occurrence when even the most vociferous locals shut up and get down to the business of (quietly) rearing young, has felt like an interminable quarter.

Yeah, yeah, we could have gone to the shore, scoped for vagrant seabirds and resident shorebirds, but the thought of vying with throngs of work-from-home cooped-up beachgoers suddenly released on their own recognizance sent a shudder through our introverted spines. So, we get no Piping Plover for the list this year, but perhaps gain an added appreciation for and intimate awareness of the comings and goings of what seems to be a bumper crop of local Blue Jays. Geri birding they call it, big sit, 5MR.

But besides the jays it’s otherwise been quiet. It was even an uncharacteristically slow summer for leps; not a single leaf on our milkweed was munched by a hungry Monarch caterpillar, and only a very occasional Vanessa shared the butterfly bush with a healthy and persistent troupe (flock? gang? cartel?) of Peck’s skippers.

When it is this slow, you can worry too much, become easily discouraged: locally about your own looming physical decrepitude, and more broadly with an abstract concern–perhaps not so abstract nowadays– that radiates out to include the country and the world. But reaching down past the gray featureless despair, past its whiff of lurking, atavistic malice, you may find just-in-time beacons of hope: the first warblers have started passing through. They’re here and there at the beginning, characteristically in the company of mixed flocks of chickadees, with the occasional associated titmouse or nuthatch. Like back in April, a Yellow-rumped was first, but a Redstart was soon to follow, and even though they are generally less colorful and less vocal than in the spring, they (anthropomorphizing here) still flit cheerfully with a certain reassuring, uplifting, and infectious joie de vivre.

Time to dust off the monopod and get off this couch.

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The End of Spring (warbler) Migration

It was a terribly sparse and spotty spring for warblering, thanks to quarantine measures such as the closing of numerous hotspots (parks and cemeteries–ironic that many cemeteries are hotspots, perhaps indicative of the sheer numbers of the damned in this part of the country) and my own reticence to get into the car to go anywhere, also fed by the pandemic.

As a result, I missed any reported fallout; all my warblers this spring were hard-won, mostly singles, just 14 species in total. No Magnolia, Black-throated Green, or Blackpoll, let alone Prairie, Blackburnian, Tennessee, Blue-winged, Bay-breasted, Cape May, etc.,.. Maybe it is my choice of habitat to frequent, but I did see some of the other, more common transients, as well as a Wilson’s and a Canada.

And a Mourning Warbler. On May 17 I was drawn to a skulker in a bramble thicket, expecting yet another Common Yellowthroat. Instead a surprise: a burst of song , and a richly colored yellow, charcoal, and greenish bird popped out, granting me crushing views at maybe ten or fifteen feet. I watched in hushed appreciation at this bird, a lifer for me. And later that afternoon I was able to relocate it with my eight-year-old.

The bird was still there early the next morning, singing, and I saw it just long enough to get a very blurry picture (thanks, PD!) before it flew off. Then it was gone for good. I was profoundly grateful. In these crazy times, you have to appreciate any glimmer of hope, no matter how skulking and fleeting, that presents itself.

I’m not winning any prizes with this terrible, awful picture of the wonderful, obliging Mourning Warbler. Note the black bib margin contrasting with a slaty grey head, and the otherwise yellow undersides. The blur is is a product of tremors, low light, and rapid heartbeat. I have since bought a new camera with optical image stabilization. (More on that soon.)
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WARBLERS!

They are coming…well, a lot of migratory passerines are, but if you’re a birder in eastern North America you’ve been waiting for this ever since the winter became unbearably tedious. Sometime in early December, to be precise. Yes, they are coming! It’s almost religious.

I got my first spring warbler this morning while walking the dog. While I did have my bins, I did not have my monopod, but in its place, still puppylike after seven years, a semi-obedient cur pulling on my “bad” hand. I had already easily identified the little bird, since it was singing to beat the band, but I wanted to see it. So I took a deep breath to calm myself, let out the leash a little so I could bring the handle up in an ill-founded hope to provide additional steadiness, poo bag dangerously close to my face (the deep breath helping here, too), and there he was: my FOY Yellow-Rumped Warbler.

Setophaga coronata. That’s right, I was excited about what some would call the closest thing to a “trash bird” in the warbler family: YRWA, Myrtle, Butter-butt, Rump, Lousy-not-something-else Warbler, Another One. “How could you possibly get excited by that?” some of you will say. “Wait,” others of you will say, “those are half-hardy and aren’t necessarily even migrants.” To both of which I reply, “F*$# off! it’s a wood-warbler, and you’re probably among those jerks who lumped Myrtles with Audubon’s in the first place. And decimated Dendroica, and made me learn a whole new set of latin names. Bastards.” But I digress.

If you stop to look at them, like you only can do when you have fresh eyes (and a relaxed neck ) at the beginning of migration, Yellow-rumps are really quite handsome. More than that, to me this tiny suburban bird, common though it may be, is a true herald of spring, kindling my optimism: spring is truly here, the birds are returning, we haven’t completely screwed up everything! With the help of this little warbler I revel in that bit of self-delusion and bask in the anticipation that I might see as many as two dozen species of these colorful little travelers in the next month, most just briefly pausing on their way to breeding grounds further north.