On Friday, after finishing up a virtual meeting at the home office, I looked out the kitchen window to see something I’d never seen in the yard before. There on the bare dirt – we’re pretty laissez faire in the landscaping department – was a Blackburnian Warbler. It’s not the first one I’ve seen in the yard - they love our oaks when they pass though in May. But it’s the first time I’ve seen one of these prized, and very arboreal migrants hopping around on the ground like a sparrow. It was startling. Seeing a Blackburnian Warbler typically comes with a neck cramp from squinting into the canopy.
Of course my camera battery was dead. The warbler moved back into the trees and I eventually got some poor photos as it played hide and seek among the leaves. Us birders love seeing a male Blackburnian in May, when their heads and breast are all the colors of a campfire, but concentrated. But it’s September, the time of the dreaded “confusing fall warblers”, as Roger Tory Peterson named them. The orange was faded – was the flame understandably dimmed by a summer raising kids? No, the adult males likely slipped through in late August, this pale orange bird probably was one of the kids.
Either way, this bird spent the summer up north, maybe in one of the cool Balsam fir forests they favor, where it smells like Christmas even in July. With winter coming, like billions of other birds across the northern forests, they choose to flee. This Blackburnian Warbler I was lucky enough to see in my yard will trade the Christmas tree forests of Canada for a cloud forest somewhere high on the eastern slope of the Andes, maybe in Colombia or Ecuador, where it might feast on the caterpillar of a moth unknown to science, in a kind of tree I’ll never hear of.
On Monday, my yard produced a very different sort of migrant, but one with an equally ambitious destination. This was a bedraggled Broad-winged Hawk, still disheveled from Sunday’s rain. It was sitting on a wire to drip-dry, unbothered by our gawking as I walked the kids to the bus stop. This could have been a local bird – I often hear their high-pitched calls as they soar high overhead in spring and summer– or it could have been a northern bird taking a break after the first leg of its fall journey.
Mid-September is when Broad-winged Hawks leave the northeast en masse, forming famously swirling flocks called kettles, concentrated over rising columns of air called thermals. By finding these thermals, perhaps where a parking lot is hotter than the surrounding landscape, they cover huge distances without flapping – soar up to height on a thermal, then glide as far as you can to the next one. Concentration points, like along the Great Lakes shorelines, can see over a hundred thousand pass in two weeks.
By the time they get to the coastal plain in Veracruz Mexico, where I was lucky to be one of the hawk watchers years ago, the various tributaries of Broad-winged Hawks draining out of North America have come together as a raging river - over two hundred thousand may pass in a day, and upwards of two million in a season. A single kettle may contain 10,000 hawks.
The hawk from my yard will pass through Veracruz in a few weeks, then down through Central America, eventually crossing the thickly forested Darien Gap where Panama meets South America. Who knows, it may winter in the same Peruvian cloud forest as that Blackburnian Warbler I saw out my window. I’ll never forget the cognitive dissonance I felt when I heard a Broad-winged Hawk calling along a high Andean stream somewhere below Machu Picchu, a familiar voice in a strange land. It was a glimpse into something I’d like you to think about this week - that secret other life that “our” birds have after they disappear from our yards and forests.
