Home, Burlington ON. October 13th. 2020. Sitting for a moment, pausing between morning garden chores, I had hardly got comfortable when I spotted twitchy movement low down among some overgrown Oxeye Sunflowers.
Over the years, I have many times spotted an interesting bird and made a fingers-crossed dash indoors to get my binoculars and camera; more than half the time it was wasted effort, the bird left. Not today though! I had pre-thought the possibility and had everything I needed at hand. I got a quick binocular look at a small, olive-green warbler of some kind searching for food, and I had my camera ready for a record shot too. I needn’t have rushed, this little bird picked and paused its way around the sunflowers paying no attention to me even as I moved to get a little closer, camera clicking all the time.
It moved from the sunflowers to our old pear tree and back, and from there to a clematis tangle. I was enjoying long binocular studies and took many pictures – hoping of course that some would clinch the identification if it came to that.
I write now, with confidence, that it was a Tennessee Warbler but at the time I was not at all certain; two key field marks, a dusky line through the eye and a pale supercilium (eyebrow) were not quite obvious enough. If not a Tennessee then the options were limited, Orange-crowned Warbler was the likeliest alternative or perhaps a young female of who-knows-what. And just in case it turned out to be an Orange-crowned, I took a couple of photos of the bird with its crown feathers raised, it sure would be a a coup to get photos of an OC’s rarely-seen orange stripe. But it wasn’t an Orange-crowned and here, for the record (needlessly), is a Tennessee Warbler with its crown feathers raised.
It was a gardening day punctuated by three or four stops for birds: a large flock of Common Grackles, a murder of a dozen American Crows noisy like a crowd after the bars close, a Downy Woodpecker and of course My Bird of the Day, this Tennessee Warbler.