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

Night before last a big storm cell maybe twenty miles west to east slowly crossed town early hours of the morning, effectively a wall dropping northbound migrants out of the sky wherever they hit it.

Next morning there was a bunch of these guys around, Blackburnian Warblers, named after the Blackburns, minor Nobility from Lancashire England who identified a specimen sent to them from the colonies in the 1740's as something new. So in the same era as the last Stuart challenge to the throne, when a couple of thousand wild and hairy Highlanders charged through Northern England, the genteel Blackburns were examining study skins, sorta like collecting stamps I would imagine.

The Blackburnian might be the prettiest warbler around, which is saying alot, mostly on account of the throat and breast of the males (all these photos lifted off the 'net).



So anyway, in the early hours of the morning on May 14th, multiple thousands of male Blackburnian Warblers were in the air over South Texas, headed north to the spruce forests of the Canadian North. Were it not for the storm stalling 'em out and grounding them, they woulda passed largely unnoticed, even by birders.

Also present in numbers and as usual one of the last species to come through, Bay-breasted Warblers.



Spruce budworm outbreaks are as natural and inevitable as forest fires in the Taiga, the moth larvae reaching superabundance and killing whole swathes of spruce trees in just a year or two. Bay-breasteds seek these areas out, and amidst this superabundant food supply can raise half again more young than regular warblers. In the off season they subsist mostly on fruit in Panama, Venzuela and Colombia.

So I'm in a local park bird watching and this fit woman on a bicycle is making circuits, got a yoga mat rolled up on the handlebars, pretty enough to merit a second look. Third circuit around she stops and asks if I was Mr. Birdwatcher and did I used to teach at the local high school. Indeed I am and I still do. Turns out she graduated twenty years ago and is now a divorced physical fitness instructor/therapist with two kids, just bought a house in the area. I didn't recognize her because she was never in my class but she remembered me, tells me how much I rocked and how her friends in my class thought I was cool, even remembered my name. Tells me I haven't changed at all ( that's prob'ly because she never saw me naked, then or now ).

We talked for about 45 minutes about birds and trees and gardens. , <"SIGH"> Pretty woman twenty years after graduation and I'm still twenty-five years older'n her, damn I'm old, more importantly, here I am finally available and to these women I'm a like a Grampa. Life is hard and then you die.....

All of that a segue to post another chestnut-sided warbler pic... one passed right by while we were talking, she was quite impressed. Back in my college days bringing a woman bird watching was a sure fire way... worked even when you weren't planning for it to work ..................... <"SIGH">



Might as well thrown in a Magnolia Warbler too, 'nother Taiga breeder coming through in good numbers.....