After a bleak winter, and a reluctant, rainy spring, we Cape and Islands year-rounders deserve a flowery and mild May. And us birders, while buoyed by each new species arrival this month, feel like we deserve something now, too – it’s mid-May, and we want our warblers. While this month can bring a treasure trove of all sorts of fancy, transient songbirds, from cuckoos to buntings and thrushes to tanagers, there is one group of May songbirds to rule them all – 36 species of colorful treetop songsters that we New Worlders call warblers.
What they call warblers in Europe and Asia are in a different family, more closely related to kinglets, and they tend to be frustrating, brown little things, each one nearly identical to the next – I think it’s why British and European birders are better than we are. When it comes to sexual selection, those drab Eurasian warblers prove themselves through superior songs, while our more flamboyant warblers use color to catch the ladies’ eye, and us birders reap the aesthetic benefits.
An Austrian birder named Dale Forbes wrote a blog piece bitterly declaring that real warblers are brown, and ours, which are sometimes called wood warblers, should be called “silly-canaries”. Then he spent a week in the New World warbler paradise of Magee Marsh, a migrant trap jutting into Lake Eerie in Ohio. It’s site of an annual mid-May birding festival called the Biggest Week in American Birding, and warblers and other migrants drip from the trees and shrubs there. Upon getting his first gander at a male Blackburnian Warbler, which is the color of a smoldering campfire ember, this European exclaimed “Holy crap, what the hell is that!”, as he described in a second blog piece titled “ok, ok, wood warblers are the bomb”.
We indeed have the best warblers, and I want you to understand that this collective of feathered eye candy may be in your yard right now. So sought after are these little birds that birders get something we call “warbler neck” from too much staring up at the canopy looking for them. We birders tend to hear them first, but if you don’t know what they sound like, or the hearing is not so acute anymore, fire up your Merlin app and see what it shows – in my experience it does very well identifying the songs of even the tricky spring warblers.
Yesterday and the day before, I had my first slug of warblers in the neighborhood. First, an invisible male Nashville Warbler sang its two part trill in my neighbor’s yard, officially kicking off warbler season for me. Then came the sibilant, squeaky bike-wheel song of Blackpoll Warblers stopping by on their way to spruce forests up north. Yesterday there were even more – Cornell’s BirdCast had estimated that over a million birds migrated over the Cape on Monday night, the highest total of the spring. Most keep going, but if we’re lucky, at least some touch down to fuel up on little green caterpillars as the ones in my yard were doing. I woke Tuesday to the sound of Black-throated Green Warblers and Northern Parulas, more Blackpolls, several Black-and-white Warblers, and a couple of Bay-breasted Warblers – the latter are richly colored, crowd-pleasers who consistently stop by my oaky, caterpillary neighborhood around now.
Birders have recorded 36 species of warbler here on the Cape, all-time, but only about 23 species are regular and expected. You might be intimidated at the idea of learning the songs of so many birds who are here only two weeks a year, and content to lean on your Merlin app, but some are pretty distinctive. Start with this fun, little ditty from the common and widespread Black-throated Green Warbler, which is described as “trees trees murmuring trees!”. Get that down and go from there. Before you know it, you may find yourself among the rest of us warbler junkies up at the Beech Forest in Provincetown, staring up into those murmuring trees. If sometime in the next two weeks you end up with a crippling case of warbler neck, then I’ll have done my job.
