WarblerFall Joy

It's that time of year when I sit at my drawing table and write with my head turned all the way to the left.

Out the window is my WarblerFall. I have the window open no matter the weather so I can hear the relaxing burble of trickling water. I can also hear the flllltttttpp! of little bird wings as they bathe, and can grab my camera to record the action! 

 Mourning dove family (baby is atop the fountain).

August and September are the prime months for the WarblerFall,  up here on my usually dry ridge. Gobs of birds are passing through, largely unnoticed, until they hear its siren call! 

A female American redstart graces the WarblerFall 20Aug2022

See how I have flat stones covering the entire bottom of the basin? You want water no more than an inch deep for the small birds you're trying to attract. Give them a variety of depths using flat rocks to adjust.

I've found no better way to keep track of what fall warblers, vireos, thrushes, finches, buntings, sparrows, and tanagers are slipping through my sanctuary than the WarblerFall. Its trickle draws them into my yard and down to drink and bathe. That gentle burble is an irresistible come-hither to a wonderful array of birds.

Mourning doves have an adorable habit of holding one wing up when they're bathing.

Sprinkle me there. Right there. 

As a little recap, I spent the last 30 or so years thinking about it, and then spent last summer figuring out how to economically construct the best bird bath possible--where to get the right components and how to put it all together. I made an instructional video and a set of detailed pictorial instructions. Both are available at 

                                                              www.warblerfall.com

If you haven't visited yet, there's a fun 2-minute promotional video that ought to give you a laugh at the very least. Zick as Bobby Flay. But I'm dead serious about the product. Since its official launch in the pages of BWD Magazine's inaugural issue July 1, this little bird bath has blown me and a LOT of others away. People have fun building it. They set it up and get wonderful bird action, often from species they wouldn't expect to see in their yards. Then they share their photos and videos on social media. I have been delighted with what I've seen from all over the country. And it's a gas to see how others interpret my instructions and use the materials at hand.

Cardinals are in the WarblerFall all the time, proving that it's not just for warblers!

Just a note: In the instructional video, I talk about placement of your WarblerFall, and make a point about why placing it on the ground is important. However I would love to do this, I can't, though. That's because I have a pack of murderous eastern chipmunks, who, over the past year, developed the habit of trying to pounce on birds as they bathed. They never caught one, but they got close. After much cussing and thought, I solved the problem by elevating the WarblerFall about 16" on an overturned ceramic planter. The chipmunks don't even try to get up there, and the birds bathe in peace. The elevation doesn't seem to deter anyone but those flat-footed 'munks.

Here's a common yellowthroat enjoying a good soak. 

 I think the most compelling thing about this fountain is the way it draws the completely unexpected. Watching it is kind of like playing the slots. You get these intermittent rewards that keep you watching. And then you hit the jackpot! 

Did my dear friend Laura ever think a yellow-billed cuckoo would come down to her backyard to bathe? No, and neither did I!! I didn't even know they bathed in water! 

That is WarblerFall Magic, right there. Laura told me that she quit feeding birds in summer because she thinks it's better for them not to have supplemental food. But the WarblerFall more than made up for it. She's had an absolute blast with it, as you'll see in subsequent posts. 

I'm posting this to remind you that NOW, August and especially September, is prime WarblerFall time. Birds are migrating. Flying so far and for so long builds up a powerful thirst. They just can't resist

a drink and a cool bath. Welcome them to your yard! Visit

www.warblerfall.com

and thank you so much for supporting me by investing in my invention--the little bird fountain that could! 

Meet the Mint Humbug

Pssst. Fall migration is in full swing. While you're asleep, warblers by the hundreds and thousands are slipping through the treetops, silently making their way toward Central America. Getting out before the frost comes, giving themselves plenty of time to travel in night skies, dropping down to forage in insect-laden leaves at daybreak. It's Fat City out there, the best time to travel, when caterpillars and crickets and spiders and aphids are everywhere. 

When there are redstarts on the roof, the move is on. You hear their lisping calls in the sky each morning. Watch the trees, see them cartwheeling through.

This little immature female black and white warbler has eaten her share of spiders, I am certain. She's clinging to the trunk of a golden Chamaecyparis right outside my studio window. If she recalls a nuthatch in her stance, that's no accident. This is the warbler who lives like a nuthatch.

She sticks close to the trunk of the tree, peering at the bark and limbs for anything crawling there. Her Latin name: Mniotilta varia, means "varied (striped) moss-plucker." Mniotilta is a monotypic genus, meaning there's only one species in it--this one. Though this bird mostly specializes on bark, it will often glean foliage. All birds are opportunists.

In this way, warblers carve up the habitat, each taking its niche within the same forest. If I remember anything from my ecology courses in college, I remember being taught to see forest birds, especially warblers, as a guild, with each one specializing in combing different parts of the tree. This is how Nature packs the forest with so many birds. If they all foraged the same way, there wouldn't be room for them all. So some take the crowns, some the shrubbery; some forage on the tops of the leaves, and some the bottoms. 

Black and white warblers spend a lot of time hanging head-down and hitching around on the bark and limbs. As such, they have strong legs and large feet.

The hallux, or hind toe, is particularly long and robust, with a large hooked claw from which the bird can hang. Much like a nuthatch's foot. Isn't that cool? From Birds of the World account by John Kricher: 

Mniotilta is treated as monotypic because of morphological adaptations for vertical (tree trunk) foraging (Parkes 1978), adaptations that include an elongated hallux, roughly as long as the tarsus (Ridgway 1902). 

Translated, that means that the hind toe of this bird is nearly as long as its leg! Check out that feature on this white-breasted nuthatch, also shot from my studio window:

Isn't it neat to see the congruencies of behavior, coloration and structure in these two unrelated species, based on the similarity in how they make their living? Convergent evolution, y'all. It makes the world go around.

Disruptive coloration, black and white striations resembling tree bark, help break up the bird's form as it works the bark. Even the undertail coverts are spotted. I noticed that this young female's nails are a fetching golden color. Now I want to check every black and white warbler to see if that color stays into adulthood. Look at those golden grappling hooks! 

From my friend John Kricher's account in Birds of the World (formerly Birds of North America), I learned that the "distal toepads (are) usually notched, a possible adaptation for bark foraging (Clark 1973b)" Blowing up my photo, I see a teeny weeny notch just anterior to the fattest part of the big toe pad. Do you?

Nice to have a black-and-white warbler so close that you can grab a photo of the notches in its distal toepads!

The black-and-white warbler is famous as a vagrant, showing up somewhat regularly in fall in Britain and Ireland. You can imagine how that thrills European birders, who are accustomed to waxing poetic about the drabbest of their hopelessly drab warblers. When you've been rhapsodizing about birds that look like this...

Great Reed Warbler, Wikipedia Commons. A lovely bird, but no Mint Humbug.

...imagine THIS striped beauty showing up, knocking everyone's damp woolen socks off.

Ah, Facebook. Beneath one photo I posted there, I got this comment from Megan Crewe, a bird tour leader for Field Guides, Inc: 

"Did you know that the British birders' nickname for these little sprites is "Mint Humbug"? That's a black-and-white peppermint candy here."

                                      Naturally, I had to check and see why...Waah hahaha!!!

Leave it to the British to come up with such a perfectly droll name for our gorgeous warbler. Mint Humbug. I can see them, whispering in code, so the rarity-seeking throng can't hear. "Psst. Mint Humbug, working a large beech, corner of Gloucester and Wembly, still there as of 1400 hours Tuesday." Thank you for that smile, Megan!!

I am delighted to say that these little darlings breed in my southeast Ohio forest. In the spring of 2020, rainy, cold and wet as it was, I watched a pair constructing a nest in the newly-cleared farthest reach, among the black maples. They were tucking wads of bark-fluff and moss at the base of tree trunk. What a weird place for a warbler nest, but then black-and-white warblers are among the weirdest of warblers. Ground nesters--with all these chipmunks and snakes and raccoons...arrrgh. Yet somehow they persist.  I never knew if the 2020 nest was successful; I was not about to walk up to it and lead predators there. Plus, I was too busy feeding starving migrants and bluebirds that awful, freezing cold, rainy May. The black-and-whites were back in 2021, voicing their squeaky-wheel song in the tulip grove just off the lower path in the orchard,  and though I rarely caught so much as a glimpse of them, that squeaky song made me smile so big. Knowing they were there was everything.

I'd love to think this little gal was hatched here, but in the fall, one never knows. The black-and-whites and all the other warblers are streaming through now. Go out, willya, and catch the show. 

Recommended Citation

 Kricher, J. C. (2020). Black-and-white Warbler (Mniotilta varia), version 1.0. In Birds of the World (A. F. Poole, Editor). Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Ithaca, NY, USA. https://doi.org/10.2173/bow.bawwar.01

 

September's Silent Parade

 As I write, Sept. 21, the ruby-throated hummingbirds are still here, just a couple juveniles still hanging around and bickering. I love them so. And through the birches and flower gardens, fall warblers are sifting through in earnest. I must glance up from my drafting board 200 times a day, and I'm nearly always rewarded by the trembling leaves that mean a warbler is plucking aphids off their undersurfaces.

My birches are loaded with little green aphids, candy to migrant warblers and hummingbirds, too. Of course, I'm glued to the windows, my big lens slishing away.

 

The magnolia warbler has a pretty yellow rump in all plumages. 

We're firmly on the fall migration route for Cape May warblers, but they're rare as hen's teeth in spring. Go figure.  This is a nice adult male, still showing his golden side neck and strong tiger stripes.

Who's that?

One of my favorite fall migrants (and breeders) is the ovenbird, a warbler that looks like a thrush. That shoe-button eye, with the surprised ring around it; those heavy droozly stripes down the belly--I just love these neat little forest dwellers.

All that would be great, but the burnt orange crown stripe is too much.

And the ovenbird walks. One shell-pink foot is placed daintily in front of the other. They walk along long branches, mincing delicately. The head bobs slightly, like a chicken's. I love everything about ovenbirds, except their tendency to crash into glass windows in fall. For them, and for so many others, I put netting over my windows.

 The resident rubythroats, making the rounds of my flowers. They won't be here much longer.  I said when I put the oversized geranium "Happy Thought Red" out in May that it would never be so beautiful again. Boy, was that the truth. The gray squirrels have chewed the crap out of it; the sun has baked its beautiful chartreuse leaves, but it gamely throws out scarlet flowers for the hummingbirds to sip. No worries. I have two tiny babies to go in the greenhouse, and they'll be big and beautiful by next spring.

Salvia guaranitica "Black and Blue" is a favorite. As often as not, the dainty flowers will drop when they're probed.

Most of my out-the-studio window photos feature sweet birds on the colorful tomato cages I use to support my taller flowers.
This is a juvenile song sparrow, impersonating a Lincoln's sparrow, with its finely penciled breast streaking.

A young Tennessee warbler briefly got itself trapped behind the netting that keeps my huge studio windows safe for migrant birds. It was a thrill to see it so close.  Birds are never trapped for long, since the netting is stretched on a PVC frame that stands almost a foot out from the window, and they have only to go up, down or sideways to get out. To learn more about this miraculous life-saver, go read my article, "A Solution to Window Strikes,"  here.

I just never know what I'm going to see, so I keep looking. Who's that on the hanging basket hook? I knew right away, because there isn't another species that has yellow (instead of white) tail spots. It's a yellow warbler!

and a very, very beautiful one. An immature yellow warbler in September is such a lovely bird, the bright yellow washed with grass-green. Yellow suffuses everything: its eye ring, tail spots, legs, feet, even its bill. It's like it drank sunshine.

 

 Fuchsia "Trandshen Bonnstadt" is the flower that it's inspecting.  I really think the spelling is wrong, if it's German, but that's how it was spelled on the Glasshouse Works label when I bought my tiny plant years ago.  Probably ought to be spelled Trandschen Bonstedt, but I can't find any other source for it than Glasshouse Works, and that's how they spell it. Still available from Glasshouse works, too!

Needless to say, I take cuttings of this miraculous tropical plant and carry it over in the greenhouse all winter. I'm petrified of losing it; it's such a cheery, free blooming soul and it roots from cuttings in water! Hummingbirds love it and they look fabulous prospecting those clusters of pink.  I have four-foot tall plants blooming their heads off, planted right in the garden soil, right now. The rabbits leave it mostly alone. Miracle. Anything the nipping, chomping, chewing animals allow to live is a pure miracle to me.

 

As a bonus, you can see the bird screen with its gray PVC frame over my studio windows. It's nicely unobtrusive, but highly effective. Those windows are doing a great job of pretending to be limitless sky. They need a screen, and they have one.

The warbler was pretty sure there should be something edible in that pretty flower. So it diddled with it for awhile, trying to see if it would produce something nice.

What a breathtakingly beautiful little bird.  Every feather is unworn and new, immaculately fringed and bordered, since this bird, who was born this spring, has just molted into a fresh suit of feathers for the long trip south.

The yellow warbler is just a part of the silent parade going on outside, all through September. Get out there! The trees are dripping with warblers. Blackburnians running into bay-breasts; black-throated blues and Cape Mays; yellows and yellowthroats and Tennessees, blackpolls and hoodeds, all coming through now in southeast Ohio. It's the greatest show on earth, and it's perfectly silent.

Keep looking up.