Tuesday, November 7, 2000
Fall migration patterns often makes end-of-year bird-watching tricky
Compared to the decisive movement of spring migration, fall migration is vague and inexact. Groups of incompletely colored birds happen along, stop overnight or maybe stay a week. Fronts, such as cold air masses or rain, affect movement of birds, but are less easily connected. Sometimes a front causes the migrating passerines to come down and stay around until it lessens or moves on.
Masses of species populations, ruby-throated hummingbirds or broadwinged hawks, or geese, are usually visible and easily documented. Small, loosely related flocks of wood warblers, and buntings, moving sporadically through an area, are seen by birders who happen to be in the right place at the right time. The number of birds seen relates directly to the amount of time spent in the field.
Watching warblers
The few flocks I was able to see this season were in late September. One day I led a group at the Birding Center at Port Aransas. At the entrance to the boardwalk, we met veteran birder Ray Little.
He was excited about the warblers that were darting unafraid between the small trees and bushes in front of us. There were several Wilson's warblers, a northern parula, a yellow warbler, a yellow-rumped warbler.
My companions were members of the Athenian club of Corpus Christi. Most of them were inexperienced birders but were able to see these up-close birds even without using binoculars.
On the wooden rail of the walk, a few yards away, stood a white ibis. It walked leisurely ahead, turning once in a while to show us its beautiful pink bill. The water was high, not ideal for wading birds, but on the tiny island that remained was a least bittern, left over from summer.
Flitting flocks
Another mixed flock of fall warblers showed themselves to Audubon Outdoor Club birders on a field trip to Welder Wildlife Refuge, near Sinton. On the Refuge road, we saw two resident species always enjoyed, tufted titmice and pyrrhuloxia. The group was divided so that half would enter at each end of Hackberry Mott. I was among those following Arlie Cooksey, expert warbler spotter, while others were with her husband, Mel, a tad more brisk but equally talented.
In the mott, Mel's group saw wild turkeys. Ours came across the feeding warblers. There was a black and white warbler, a northern parula, several Wilson's warblers, a yellow warbler, a black-throated green, and a Nashville warbler.
The trick with these little flocks is to look fast and not take your binoculars down. The flocks travel quickly through the tops of trees, large or small, moving along from one branch to the next with only a brief pause to snap up here an insect, there a berry.
Identifying warblers
A warbler is a small, mostly insect eating, songbird. Of the 115 species of New World warblers, slightly more than half breed in North America, north of Mexico. Most of these travel south to Mexico and South America, where food is more abundant, to spend the winter. People unfamiliar with birds often refer to them as "those little wild canaries." This misconception is based on the fact that many warblers in fall plumage are yellowish, often very yellow.
Passerines are perching birds of widely varying size, color and habit. Besides warblers, this group includes orioles, buntings, kinglets, flycatchers, wrens, thrushes and many others.
At Packery Channel Park one evening we found an interesting fall group of about 20 individuals, all warm brown in color, working the sunflower seeds. All of them stayed low as they pecked industriously at the drying plants.
Finally, on one of them we noticed a patch of pale turquoise feathers - our birds were indigo buntings, females or immature males. A solitary scissor-tailed flycatcher came to crown the top of the mott, and, as it began to be dark, we saw an empidonax flaycatcher I would not try to name. It darted out and back from a trailing vine at the north end.
