Palm Warblers

Paletta Park, Burlington, ON. May 7^th.  2021.  I spent a good part of this afternoon sitting around waiting and watching for birds to drop out of the sky.  A bit of an exaggeration but it’s one way to describe how, sometimes, migrant warblers can be all but absent and then suddenly appear. 

Today’s setting needs explanation. I was sitting on an old wave-washed log about 20 feet inland from the lapping shore of Lake Ontario. This was in a rough and ready corner of the park, a place too subject to storm damage and flooding to keep tended. Around me and arcing overhead were large Cottonwood trees, in front a hopeless tangle of grapes, honeysuckle and storm-tossed flotsam, and completing the picture was a cold on-shore breeze.

But that breeze was working for me, I’m sure it was aiding migrant warblers make a corner-cutting jump across the lake. If you were to look out over the lake you might see gulls, cormorants and mergansers on the water but you’d never spot a tiny, airborne warbler heading towards you, but I’m sure they were there. And I think their landfall was those trees and shrubs and vines all around me. So, one minute nothing and the next a Palm Warbler would be picking its way through the cast-ashore debris, then another or maybe three. In time they’d move on, moving inland and might be replaced by more Palm Warblers, a Yellow–rumped or a Black & White Warbler; and so it went on for an hour or two, or for as long as I had the patience to stay there.

There were other birds in the park, each in its own niche: Nashville, Yellow, and Chestnut–sided Warblers, Warbling Vireos, Northern Parulas and Baltimore Orioles. My Birds of the Day though were the PalmWarblers, not the showiest warbler, but colourful nevertheless, and one of the first of the family to arrive each spring.  They are almost entertaining in the way they bob their tail as they walk, picking for little insects to fuel the next leap northward. Their journey is about two-thirds done.  They have come from the Gulf Coast regions of the U.S and are heading to the bogs and fens in the boreal forests, a few hundred kilometers to go. I took many photos and, as always deleted most of them but I’ve added a few of the best.