Yellow Warbler

3 May 2015. Hamilton ON.  I think today was the day of the Yellow Warbler; they’re back and, I hope, ushering in the warblers of May. In a week or two, Yellow Warblers will be too numerous to count, they’ll be just a part of the background noise. But today I was greeted by the first of the year; and standing in one spot, I could distinguish four, maybe five, all singing their hurried ‘Sweet sweet shredded wheat” song. I think they were all males, bright buttercup yellow with chestnut streaks down the breast. My Birds of the Day for being here.

I started the day really early by taking my daughter’s dog for a walk; something I used to do frequently. The sun was still lingering below the horizon as we walked a couple of kilometers along a power-line right-of-way, a wide expanse of grassland flanked by scrubby forest. About every one-hundred metres along the edges, a Field Sparrow was singing its territorial heart out, for every four Field Sparrows there was an Eastern Towhee, also in full song and in the distance a singing Brown Thrasher. It reminded me of my formative days in England when my dad and I would cycle around the dew-sparkling countryside listening to the exuberant dawn chorus of Blackbirds, Song Thrushes and Skylarks; these are vivid memories.

The Yellow Warblers showed up later in the morning up on one of my census walks. They, along with a single Western Palm Warbler, a pair of Blue-gray Gnatcatchers and a singing Warbling Vireo (another first) made going without breakfast worthwhile. I counted a couple of dozen Common Terns swooping over the lake waters and a handful of their cousins, Caspian Terns, loafing on a shingle shoreline.