WARBLERS RETURNING
by
Walter L. Meagher
Photos by Wayne Colony
Mexico is where we wait. New friends arrive; old friends depart. There is no reliable constancy in the residence of birds either. Some stay all year; we count on their presence – the Mexican Duck, for example - but familiarity diminishes, just a little, not completely, the pleasure we take in their company. Living in a winter vacation home of birds that come from Manitoba and stay all winter, or come from Ontario and northern New England and stop by on their way to Belize, we are spoiled by seasonal novelty. When two warblers arrived one day, I knew I was lucky.
What are warblers? They don’t warble, they don’t sing softly with a succession of trilling notes; some do, of course, but not the two warblers visiting my aspen tree. In fact, it is not for their song that we notice them, but for their petite size, their catwalk model slender form, their restrained use of bright and contrasting colors and, most of all, for their expenditure of energy beyond reason. Up, down, over, under twig and branch, poking into sheaves of uplifted bark, inspecting every concealment of which any insect, especially larvae, or any spider and its offspring, can avail itself: there, in the aspen tree, a warbler moves before I can fix my binoculars on it.
What are warblers? They don’t warble, they don’t sing softly with a succession of trilling notes; some do, of course, but not the two warblers visiting my aspen tree. In fact, it is not for their song that we notice them, but for their petite size, their catwalk model slender form, their restrained use of bright and contrasting colors and, most of all, for their expenditure of energy beyond reason. Up, down, over, under twig and branch, poking into sheaves of uplifted bark, inspecting every concealment of which any insect, especially larvae, or any spider and its offspring, can avail itself: there, in the aspen tree, a warbler moves before I can fix my binoculars on it.
The species we see most often in San Miguel - in Colonia San Antonio as often as in El Charco - are the Wilson’s and the Yellow-rumped Warblers, belonging to a large family of birds, the Wood Warblers (Parulidae) of North
America, with 54 (57) species. ‘Wood’ is generally apt: these are birds that feed high in deciduous and coniferous trees, but not exclusively, and this raises an interesting point about evolution. Nature is conservative; given a good design, it is retained in the genes. The first warbler, with its keen slender, short, pointed, prodding, poking bill must have been a successful hunter.
There are many warblers, because the basic design worked in dense undergrowth, in canebrakes, on the ground of leafy woods, not just in treetops - wherever insects could be hunted on and under leaves, in the dens and caverns of bark.
In his Mississippi River Journal, Audubon mentions seeing a ‘great Many Autumnal Warblers’ near where the Ohio River joins the Mississippi. This was one of his names for the Yellow-rumped Warbler. When he arrived in New Orleans, he ‘saw them every day ... even in the City.’ (John James Audubon, Writings and Drawings, 1999, The Library of America, NY, p. 110.) While migration is a wonder of the natural history of bird life (and some butterflies), it is not required of every species to fly long distances; some Connecticut birds are content to winter in North Carolina. A Stakhanovite of migration is the Golden Plover, flying from arctic tundra to Patagonia.
Spring migration of warblers in my home state of Pennsylvania, when male birds were theater-perfect in breeding plumage, was a high point of the birding year. I could not identify them without expert help. The day and place of our gathering was set by the Philadelphia Academy of Science. The leader was ready ahead of anyone else, at 7:30 a.m., neck bent back, binoculars held steady, looking into the top of the trees where the wide soon-to-be concealing leaves were not fully grown. ‘Chestnut-sided at 3 o’clock,’ he said. ‘Blackburnian at six o’clock.’ ‘Has the Chestnut-sided moved? I can’t see it.’ ‘It’s gone. But at a quarter to six there are a Myrtle and a Magnolia, side by side.’ What bliss! A light show of flitting colors – necks, chests, flanks, wing bars - in maple tree tops.
Note: In addition to the Wilson’s and Yellow-rumped Warblers, Wayne and Susan Colony have seen six other species of warblers in El Charco.
November 2008