Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Spring Migration summary

Nice photos, seems like most birders have cameras with 'em nowadays.

Before I came to Texas I thought the great-crested flycatcher was unique, turns out its just one of a crowd. Down here we also have the similar but slightly larger brown-crested flycatcher and the similar but smaller ash-throated flycatcher, all inside the city limits, and in the case of the great-crested and brown-crested, even in the same woods. This not counting half a dozen other variations on the same theme in Mexico and Central America.


Chestnut-sideds are as improbable a bird as are cerulean warblers. Birds of second-growth woodlands and successional forest edges, rare and local in Audubon's day before the White guys came and cut down everything. Almost the whole population used to winter in and around Honduras, where I understand they are still abundant in winter today.

The chestnut-sideds particular thing is they are adapted to pick insects off of the underside of leaves, which accounts for their often horizontal head down tail-up posture. Why that works especially well in brush and second growth I have no idea, neither do I know why that lifestyle selects for a largely white warbler with a very dissimilar, duller juvenile.

Last time I checked, the chestnut-sideds closest relative is the ubiquitous yellow warbler, which apparently breeds in willows along watercourses everywhere in North America but Texas, clear up to Pt. Barrow. The vast Taiga/Tundra population is flooding through here, even as we speak, just kicked off in the last week.(photos lifted off the 'net).




'Nother probable far northern representative of a species that also breeds in and around wetlands all over was the Common Yellowthroat I saw foraging in mesquite today, if he can average 150 miles a night he'll be 2,000 miles north into the Canadian boonies in about two weeks,