Bird Neighbors Part 14

MYRTLE WARBLER (Dendroica coronata) Wood Warbler family

Called also: YELLOW-RUMPED WARBLER [AOU 1998]; MYRTLE BIRD; YELLOW-CROWNED WARBLER

Length -- 5 to 5.5 inches. About an inch smaller than the English sparrow.

Male -- In summer plumage: A yellow patch on top of head, lower back, and either side of the breast. Upper parts bluish slate, streaked with black. Upper breast black; throat white; all other under parts whitish, streaked with black. Two white wing bars, and tail quills have white spots near the tip. In winter: Upper parts olive-brown, streaked with black; the yellow spot on lower back the only yellow mark remaining. Wing-bars grayish.

Female -- Resembles male in winter plumage.

Range -- Eastern North America. Occasional on Pacific slope.

Summers from Minnesota and northern New England northward to Fur Countries. Winters from Middle States south ward into Central America; a few often remaining at the northern United States all the winter.

Migrations -- April. October. November. Also, but more rarely, a winter resident.

The first of the warblers to arrive in the spring and the last to leave us in the autumn, some even remaining throughout the northern winter, the myrtle warbler, next to the summer yellowbird, is the most familiar of its mult.i.tudinous kin. Though we become acquainted with it chiefly in the migrations, it impresses us by its numbers rather than by any gorgeousness of attire. The four yellow spots on crown, lower back, and sides are its distinguis.h.i.+ng marks; and in the autumn these marks have dwindled to only one, that on the lower back or rump. The great difficulty experienced in identifying any warbler is in its restless habit of flitting about.

For a few days in early May we are forcibly reminded of the Florida peninsula, which fairly teems with these birds; they become almost superabundant, a distraction during the precious days when the rarer species are quietly slipping by, not to return again for a year, perhaps longer, for some warblers are notoriously irregular in their routes north and south, and never return by the way they travelled in the spring.

But if we look sharply into every group of myrtle warblers, we are quite likely to discover some of their dainty, fragile cousins that gladly seek the escort of birds so fearless as they. By the last of May all the warblers are gone from the neighborhood except the constant little summer yellowbird and redstart.

In autumn, when the myrtle warblers return after a busy enough summer pa.s.sed in Canadian nurseries, they chiefly haunt those regions where juniper and bay-berries abound. These latter (Myrica cerifera), or the myrtle wax-berries, as they are sometimes called, and which are the bird's favorite food, have given it their name. Wherever the supply of these berries is sufficient to last through the winter, there it may be found foraging in the scrubby bushes.

Sometimes driven by cold and hunger from the fields, this hardiest member of a family that properly belongs to the tropics, seeks shelter and food close to the outbuildings on the farm.

PARULA WARBLER (Compsothlypis americana) Wood Warbler family

Called also: BLUE YELLOW-BACKED WARBLER; [NORTHERN PARULA, AOU 1998]

Length -- 4.5 to 4.75 inches. About an inch and a half shorter than the English sparrow.

Male and Female -- Slate-colored above, with a greenish-yellow or bronze patch in the middle of the back. Chin, throat, and breast yellow. A black, bluish, or rufous band across the breast, usually lacking in female. Underneath white, sometimes marked with rufous on sides, but these markings are variable.

Wings have two white patches; outer tail feathers have white patch near the end.

Range -- Eastern North America. Winters from Florida southward.

Migrations -- April. October. Summer resident.

Through an open window of an apartment in the very heart of New York City, a parula warbler flew this spring of 1897, surely the daintiest, most exquisitely beautiful bird visitor that ever voluntarily lodged between two brick walls.

A number of such airy, tiny beauties flitting about among the blossoms of the shrubbery on a bright May morning and swaying on the slenderest branches with their inimitable grace, is a sight that the memory should retain into old age.

They seem the very embodiment of life, joy, beauty, grace; of everything lovely that birds by any possibility could be. Apparently they are wafted about the garden; they fly with no more effort than a dainty lifting of the wings, as if to catch the breeze, that seems to lift them as it might a bunch of thistledown. They go through a great variety of charming posturings as they hunt for their food upon the blossoms and tender fresh twigs, now creeping like a nuthatch along the bark and peering into the crevices, now gracefully swaying and balancing like a goldfinch upon a slender, pendent stem. One little sprite pauses in its hunt for the insects to raise its pretty head and trill a short and wiry song.

But the parula warbler does not remain long about the gardens and orchards, though it will not forsake us altogether for the Canadian forests, where most of its relatives pa.s.s the summer. It retreats only to the woods near the water, if may be, or to just as close a counterpart of a swampy southern woods, where the Spanish or Usnea "moss" drapes itself over the cypresses, as it can find here at the north. Its rarely [found,] beautiful nest, that hangs suspended from a slender branch very much like the Baltimore oriole's, is so woven and festooned with this moss that its concealment is perfect.

BLACK-THROATED BLUE WARBLER (Dendroica caerulescens) Wood Warbler family

Length -- 5.30 inches. About an inch shorter than the English sparrow.

Male -- Slate-color, not blue above; lightest on forehead and darkest on lower back. Wings and tail edged with bluish.

Cheeks, chin, throat, upper breast, and sides black. Breast and underneath white. White spots on wings, and a little white on tail.

Female -- Olive-green above; underneath soiled yellow. Wing-spots inconspicuous. Tail generally has a faint bluish tinge.

Range -- Eastern North America, from Labrador to tropics, where It winters.

Migrations -- May. September. Usually a migrant only in the United States.

Whoever looks for this beautifully marked warbler among the bluebirds, will wish that the man who named him had possessed a truer eye for color. But if the name so illy fits the bright slate-colored male, how grieved must be his little olive-and-yellow mate to answer to the name of black-throated blue warbler when she has neither a black throat nor a blue feather! It is not easy to distinguish her as she flits about the twigs and leaves of the garden in May or early autumn, except as she is seen in company with her husband, whose name she has taken with him for better or for worse. The white spot on the wings should always be looked for to positively identify this bird.

Before flying up to a twig to peck off the insects, the birds have a pretty vireo trick of c.o.c.king their heads on one side to investigate the quant.i.ty hidden underneath the leaves. They seem less nervous and more deliberate than many of their restless family.

Most warblers go over the Canada border to nest, but there are many records of the nests of this species in the Alleghanies as far south as Georgia, in the Catskills, in Connecticut, northern Minnesota and Michigan. Laurel thickets and moist undergrowth of woods in the United States, and more commonly pine woods in Canada, are the favorite nesting haunts. A sharp zip, zip, like some midsummer insect's noise, is the bird's call-note, but its love-song, zee, zee, zee, or twee, twea, twea-e-e, as one authority writes it, is only rarely heard in the migrations. It is a languid, drawling little strain, with an upward slide that is easily drowned in the full bird chorus of May.

BLUE AND BLUISH BIRDS

Bluebird Indigo Bunting Belted Kingfisher Blue Jay Blue Grosbeak Barn Swallow Cliff Swallow Mourning Dove Blue-gray Gnatcatcher

Look also among Slate-colored Birds in preceding group, particularly among the Warblers there, or in the group of Birds conspicuously Yellow and Orange.

BLUE AND BLUISH BIRDS

THE BLUEBIRD (Sialia sialis) Thrush family

Called also: BLUE ROBIN; [EASTERN BLUEBIRD, AOU 1998]

Length -- 7 inches. About an inch longer than the English sparrow.

Male -- Upper parts, wings, and tail bright blue, with rusty wash in autumn. Throat, breast, and sides cinnamon-red. Underneath white.

Female -- Has duller blue feathers, washed with gray, and a paler breast than male.

Range -- North America, from Nova Scotia. and Manitoba to Gulf of Mexico. Southward in winter from Middle States to Bermuda and West Indies.

Migrations -- March. November. Summer resident. A few sometimes remain throughout the winter.

With the first soft, plaintive warble of the bluebirds early in March, the sugar camps, waiting for their signal, take on a bustling activity; the farmer looks to his plough; orders are hurried off to the seedsmen; a fever to be out of doors seizes one: spring is here. Snowstorms may yet whiten fields and gardens, high winds may howl about the trees and chimneys, but the little blue heralds persistently proclaim from the orchard and garden that the spring procession has begun to move.Tru-al-ly, tru-al-ly, they sweetly a.s.sert to our incredulous ears.

The bluebird is not always a migrant, except in the more northern portions of the country. Some representatives there are always with us, but the great majority winter south and drop out of the spring procession on its way northward, the males a little ahead of their mates, which show housewifely instincts immediately after their arrival. A pair of these rather undemonstrative matter-of-fact lovers go about looking for some deserted woodp.e.c.k.e.r's hole in the orchard, peering into cavities in the fence-rails, or into the bird-houses that, once set up in the old-fas.h.i.+oned gardens for their special benefit, are now appropriated too often by the ubiquitous sparrow. Wrens they can readily dispossess of an attractive tenement, and do. With a temper as heavenly as the color of their feathers, the bluebird's sense of justice is not always so adorable. But sparrows unnerve them into cowardice. The comparatively infrequent nesting of the bluebirds about our homes at the present time is one of the most deplorable results of unrestricted sparrow immigration. Formerly they were the commonest of bird neighbors.

Nest-building is not a favorite occupation with the bluebirds, that are conspicuously domestic none the less. Two, and even three, broods in a season fully occupy their time. As in most cases, the mother-bird does more than her share of the work. The male looks with wondering admiration at the housewifely activity, applauds her with song, feeds her as she sits brooding over the nestful of pale greenish-blue eggs, but his adoration of her virtues does not lead him into emulation.

"s.h.i.+fting his light load of song, From post to post along the cheerless fence,"

Lowell observed that he carried his duties quite as lightly.

When the young birds first emerge from the sh.e.l.l they are almost black; they come into their splendid heritage of color by degrees, lest their young heads might be turned. It is only as they spread their tiny wings for their first flight from the nest that we can see a few blue feathers.

With the first cool days of autumn the bluebirds collect in flocks, often a.s.sociating with orioles and kingbirds in sheltered, sunny places where insects are still plentiful. Their steady, undulating flight now becomes erratic as they take food on the wing -- a habit that they may have learned by a.s.sociation with the kingbirds, for they have also adopted the habit of perching upon some conspicuous lookout and then suddenly launching out into the air for a pa.s.sing fly and returning to their perch. Long after their a.s.sociates have gone southward, they linger like the last leaves on the tree.

It is indeed "good-bye to summer" when the bluebirds withdraw their touch of brightness from the dreary November landscape.

The bluebirds from Canada and the northern portions of New England and New York migrate into Virginia and the Carolinas, the birds from the Middle States move down into the Gulf States to pa.s.s the winter. It was there that countless numbers were cut off by the severe winter of 1894-95, which was so severe in that section.

INDIGO BUNTING (Pa.s.serina cyanea) Finch family

Called also: INDIGO BIRD

Length -- 5 to 6 inches. Smaller than the English sparrow, or the size of a canary.

Male -- In certain lights rich blue, deepest on head. In another light the blue feathers show verdigris tints. Wings, tail, and lower back with brownish wash, most prominent in autumn plumage. Quills of wings and tail deep blue, margined with light.

Female -- Plain sienna-brown above. Yellowish on breast and shading to white underneath, and indistinctly streaked. Wings and tail darkest, sometimes with slight tinge of blue in outer webs and on shoulders.

Range -- North America, from Hudson Bay to Panama. Most common in eastern part of United States. Winters in Central America and Mexico.

Migrations -- May. September. Summer resident.