Birding Western Mass: Warblers Outbound

Thoughts on Birding from the Quabbin to the Berkshires

Study Up

I caught a few warblers at Land of Providence on Friday. I’ve mentioned the Hot Spot in a previous newsletter.

Your fall warbler prove-me-wrong list is basically:

• yellow-rumped

• pine warbler

• palm warbler

• blackpoll warbler

by which I mean that you might see a number of warblers this late, including redstarts, parulas, cape mays, and others (you see these on the rare-bird emails), but the vast majority will be yellow-rumpeds, some will be palms, and a very few will be something else.

To be direct, on average, yellow-rumps are 7x more often seen than palms. They are about 100x more often seen than blackpolls. You got a warbler, it’s a yellow-rump or a palm or it’s special. (You might indeed be seeing something special. Why not you? If you like rare, read on for tactics.)

So study up on your yellow-rumpeds and palms.

When you see something you’re fairly sure is a warbler — horizontal orientation, tapered front and back, narrow probing bill:

• Look first for the the yellow-rumped’s yellow rump (call me abstemious, but I still don’t like “butterbutt” for a creature I see as heroic as a human). See it? You have a yellow-rumped.

• Next, look for the palm’s bouncy bottom — and/or its yellow underparts to the rear. See it? You have a palm.

If you don’t see those things, start saying what you CAN see. Confirm for yourself that it’s a warbler. It may be quite difficult. I will cheerfully say I feel stumped often by fall warblers. But going through the field marks, catching as many as you can, and then thinking them through in a proper system is your best move.

Here is a picture I took once of a yellow-rumped warbler. I am not trolling you; it’s in there about 40% from the right and 40% down from the top. If you want to see it on flickr, with the little note that you can see if you hover your mouse over it, you are welcome to. This is why I don’t make a point of taking pictures of birds — most of them aren’t as good as photographers’ pictures of birds.

Overflight

The exceptional research paper “Six decades of North American bird banding records reveal plasticity in migration phenology” has occupied me for nearly a year, I think. It’s a potent and affecting document that lays out how the recent history of new world warbler migration variation can be linked to weather conditions.

In short, some warblers move earlier in spring when the weather is warmer. Others don’t. And only a few move later in the fall when weather is warmer. Most do not benefit, across all maturity groups, from remaining behind.

Specifically, orange-crowned warblers bounce way early and may adjust profoundly in the event of global warming, which means they may do OK. Other such likely reactors are the blackpoll, the Canada, the chestnut-sided, the Nashville, the Tennessee and the Wilson’s.

I left out the yellow-rumped because you may have already guessed that. And they’re one of the warblers that may adjust more significantly in the fall. Also in that category are the bay-breasted, the magnolia and the Tennessee.

What does it mean to live in an era of such change?

I am trying to mourn less. After all, most humans never know if they have seen the birds I just listed. Few of my friends have. I imagine my own parents don’t know, nor my grandmother, who loved the birds, nor many or most of my co-workers. This is an aspect of living that they don’t experience. You may be new to it, or you may have been a birder for 50 years or longer, as I have been. You are witness to something astounding. This is the power of awe.

No fragile creature will thrive in the anthropocene era where it lived before this era. The ruination will approach the absolute. Warblers will be harmed as species.

It should come as no surprise that the versatile yellow-rumped will be among those that may even benefit. We are versatile; we have benefited some, and so have starlings, parrots, fish crows, and on.

I am reading about Doggerland. Humans contributed nothing to its disappearance, so drastic that it may have been measured within generations. The human race has made global warming. But it’s not your fault or mine. It is our nature to use things up. It is a terrible nature but it is also a fact, as the scorpion explained to the frog.

You are not to blame for damage to the warblers, any more than you brought the starlings, or slew passenger pigeons. None of us dwells without sins, but all of us have some virtue. The work in this scientific research, which is based on painstaking analyses of banding stations records’ since the mid-century, reveals to us that there is hope for some and others seem more likely to be lost.

I spend a good deal of time contemplating the end of the expansion of human time. I calculate without figures the use of fossil fuel to multiply human headcount, so many families benefiting from this boon but the world warped as a result. No matter how you measure it, we will run out of such fuel some day. And even if we convert to other energy resources, it seems likely that the Earth has a carrying capacity — eventually.

While the idea of living in a way that would protect these warblers is attractive, our history does not make it hopeful.

I saw how intrepid these creatures were this week. When I’m in Florida, I see members of the same species, infinitely brave, making great clouds of life. I’m thankful this beauty is something I can see. I try to see it for everyone.

Don’t forget to vote.