Welcome to September everyone! By now everyone knows what I am up to all day and all night so no need to belabor that point beyond apologizing more for being out of pocket for a good portion of this month. The good news is Brad and Jan have made it back safely from their latest excursion with SD cards full of future Intrigued fodder. I suspect it will take them some time to parse and process all the finds from that recent adventure (they have a ways to go before closing in on my 3 year backlog level…ha), but he has several accounts from outings earlier in the year that we will be featuring this month. To start things off, let’s go with some field work we did together.
Take it away Brad…
It was time for the 2nd Annual Intrigued Corporate Warbler Watch and Walk in the Woods. Actually, that sounds like a good thing to start officially, with a bit of rebranding: Intrigued (or International) Warbler Watch & Walk in the Woods, or the IW4. Intrigued HQ started it here first, go spread the word! I think that might be a great T-shirt idea paired with our corporate logo. We must get the Intrigued marketing department to work on that right away. (XXL Tall in Tec for me please.)
I met Brian at Intrigued HQ to start our day. When I arrived at HQ, Brian had already been chasing a Tennessee Warbler around the estate. Being new to this bird, I asked what color it was (guessing a shade of yellow) so I could look for motion. Brian replied, “It’s olive-colored with some yellow on it.” Great! Just like every single leaf in the woods at that point. We could certainly hear two of them communicating. I think one was saying, “Watch this, I can get those guys to look over here.” And the other would reply, “Good one, now it’s my turn. Watch their heads snap around the other direction.” After spending time being laughed at by the Tennessee Warbler (they can trash talk, must have learned it from Raven and Ruger), we decided to expand our warbler search to nearby Jubilee State Park grounds. Luckily, the park is only a few minutes from HQ and makes for great “Work from Woods” days.
Brian led us down a new trail, well, new to Intrigued outings at least. However, a new trail always has the risk of an unseen root reaching up to grab you. A couple of hundred feet into the trail, even I could make out warbler calls throughout the woods without using Merlin, though it is good for a memory aid to have bird songs and calls recorded with the timestamp to help sort photos later.
After a brief hike and photographing warblers for about 90 minutes (do you know how spastic they can be?), we decided to head to a new spot to see what we could see. Cresting a small hill, Brian noticed the trail back to the parking lot was mostly mud near the creek. The whole area had just had inches of rain a few days prior. What good are hiking boots if they aren’t muddy? We continued.
In the middle of the squishiest part of the trail, Brian said to stop and pointed to a small tree. I followed his outstretched arm to find a small yellow dot flitting about the twigs in a tree.
Hit the jump to find out what caught our attention!
It’s a Prothonotary Warbler (Protonotaria citrea), and +1 for me. Not to worry, the photos do improve as the story wanders along.
Their preferred habitat is wooded bottomlands near a stream or a swamp in the Southeast. Were the bird habitat definition people looking over our shoulders? That’s precisely where we found this one, except for the Southeast part. It was perched on a twig in a very small tree hanging over a creek. Brian and I were standing on muddy ground from recent rains, watching this little yellow bird hop all over the thin twigs
This P-warbler (and maybe all of them do) have a superpower. They can “scootch” along twigs without seeming to move their tiny legs. I saw this one scootching up and down twigs without moving several times during our visit. Nearly instantly, I had this chorus running through my head, modified for birding of course:
Slide to the left.
Slide to the right.
Criss cross
Criss cross
Something subtle was going on. Usually, I can see the birds hopping along a twig. There was deep afternoon forest dappled lighting, high ISO setting, and as wide an aperture as my lens allowed. While the camera could capture images, my eyes couldn’t quite pick up the fancy footwork. The P-warbler was “scootching” along the twig, sort of in a Michael Jackson “moonwalk” fashion. Brian and I saw it move down, or up twigs with the same fluidity.
Up twig this time
Down twig this time
If you look closely in the middle photo above, you can see some of the fancy footwork captured by the camera. The P-warbler has a foot lifted as it “scootches” up the twig.
Not only did we see fancy footwork, we saw feeding behavior. Well, the camera saw it. I didn’t see it until I was in the digital darkroom later that day, or maybe even the next day.
One bug this time
One bug this time
Every birdy flap your wings
Flap, flap, flap, flap, flap, flap, flap, flap
I’m not sure if Brian was singing the same song in his head at the time. And I was really hoping I wasn’t singing out loud; it’s usually not pretty.
We were smack dab near the middle of its breeding range. This one was probably looking for a mate. During breeding season, P-warblers like to eat spiders, butterflies, flies, essentially any insect that crawls or flies that they can easily catch as witnessed in the photos above. The male selects several former woodpecker or chickadee nesting sites and presents them to a prospective mate. The female has selection rights for nesting. The male installs the carpet, but the female builds the rest of the nest over the next 3-8 days. The seasonally monogamous pair will raise 3-7 eggs total across 1-3 broods in a single breeding season. Incubation is 12-14 days, with nesting another 9-10 days. Pairs will often return to the same nesting site the following season. Brown-headed Cowbirds (eg. asshats) lay their eggs in Prothonotary Warbler nests, forcing foster parents to raise cowbird eggs often at the expense of their own.
I could imagine it asking, “Did you capture my good side? Hurry, the light is fading.”
Cha Cha real slow now y’all (apologies to DJ Casper)
Thank you for reading. If you want to see more Prothonotary Warbler photos, please visit here.
Credits:
Thanks again to Jan and Allyson for proofreading and editing.
Life Intrigued 