05/18/2026
From the banding station: Abundance is nature’s way, and spring presents boundless opportunities for the full display of its providence. We hit our highest diversity of the season last Tuesday with a total of twenty species by the end of the morning. A group of young students couldn’t stop exclaiming, “This is so amazing!” with each new avian face.
Warblers included Ovenbirds, Common Yellowthroats, Northern Waterthrush, Magnolia, Black-and-white, and even a Northern Parula. Like other warblers, Parulas are known for gleaning insects from the tips of leaves as well as sallying, which is a specific foraging behavior where a bird leaps from a perch to sn**ch a flying insect out of the air. In this way, warblers can make the trees come to life in spring—not only with their bright colors and songs—but also with their jubilant acrobatics.
The highlight of the catch was an elegant Orchard Oriole, much more petite than the Baltimore Oriole and more subtle in brick red tones. Known to be late spring migrants, Orchard Orioles are also some of the briefest neotropical visitors to our temperate young forests, with some heading back to their wintering grounds as early as mid-July. Perhaps this is an outcome of the “southern home hypothesis”, which scientists believe applies to birds like orioles. Once fully tropical, they may have begun to migrate north as the ice sheets retreated some 15,000 years ago. This would have enabled them to take advantage of newly unoccupied (and less snakey) breeding habitat.
Last week’s catch was rounded out by a Lincoln’s Sparrow and thrushes galore: Veery, Wood Thrush, Swainson’s, and a Gray-cheeked. We know the spring migration is drawing to a close when the languid Gray-cheeked Thrushes appear because they have the northernmost destination. While most of the other migrants have already made it to their parties, this shy thrush knows there’s no sense arriving to the subarctic taiga too early.
There’s a lot going on in the woods,
Blake
*All birds safely handled, banded, and released under state and federal permits for research purposes.
