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Birdwatching
with Phyllis Yochem
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Tuesday, May 30, 2000
Late-arriving mourning warbler, with its brave little song, a nice surprise
Other warblers seen recently include MacGillivray's, Tennessee, American redstart
A pilon, pronounced pea-lone, with the accent on the last syllable, is a Spanish word meaning a little something extra, a freebie, a gift thrown in by the proprietor to sweeten the sale.
A pilon is what South Texas birders got last weekend.
We thought we had probably seen the last of the migrating birds this season. Then last weekend, we had a purifying thunderstorm in the night with a convincing light show, and an inch or so of rain thrown in. While pruning and weeding the following morning, I heard a brave little song, warbler type, coming from a dense thicket in the back corner of the yard.
Quick, the binoculars! Trying to localize it was the next problem. It sprang from layers of leaf mold and worked its way between tight branches of the cascading yellow jasmine beneath which our dear eccentric gray cat, Biff, is buried. It wafted along to the loquat tree. I tried to give the singer a chance to show before making impatient pishing noises in an attempt to coax it out.
No good. That bird was singing safely hidden behind leafy layers of bush. Then, to my surprise, he answered boldly, but stayed put.
Late migrant
As it turned out, a few pishes later, he seemed to want to be seen and recognized. What he was seemed impossible . . . a mourning warbler. He first thrust his gray head up among the grapevine, then his whole body emerged and I could not believe my eyes.
Roger Tory Peterson's description of a mourning warbler is "olive above, yellow below, with a gray hood completely encircling the head and neck; male with an apron of black crape on upper breast where hood meets yellow.'' The lack of even a partial white eye ring distinguishes it from the Connecticut warbler and from MacGillivray's warbler, its western counterpart.
I think the only other mourning warbler I ever saw was discovered in Blucher Park by Charley Clark many springs ago, working along the bottom of an old wooden fence, in deep shadow. Its distinctive, slightly puffed, black cravat was nevertheless clearly visible.
The field guides explain that mourning warblers are the last to arrive on their breeding grounds in Canada and the northern United States. They have the latest spring migration peak of all our warblers, from mid-May to early June.
Other warbler sightings
Mel Cooksey lives at Padre Isles. According to a comprehensive account of species he saw the same day (May 20) at Packery Channel Park, Blucher Park and other locations, the birds were down.
His list began with a very late upland sandpiper flying over, and included many empidonax and other species of flycatchers. It included yellow-billed and one black-billed cuckoo, Swainson's thrush, veery, a cat-bird and a red-eyed vireo. Also included were blue grosbeak, indigo bunting and orchard and Baltimore orioles.
Warblers seen by Cooksey were Tennessee, yellow, chestnut-sided, magnolia, Cape May, black-throated green and Blackburnian. He also saw blackpoll warblers, black and white, American redstarts, ovenbirds, northern waterthrush, common yellowthroat and Wilson's and Canada warblers. His list was completed by a sighting of five to six mourning warblers and an incredible two MacGillivray's, one at Blucher and one at Packery Channel Park. Both of them, he said, were females.
Phyllis Yochem, a Corpus Christi
resident, has studied birds of Texas since 1960.
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