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Seeing our last bird of the trip, a Canada Warbler, I commented to Dan that our just-completed, six-day circuit had been book-ended by premium warblers: Mourning Warbler and Canada Warbler. It got me thinking. Could it be that we saw a special new warbler each day? I went back over my notes and no, we didn’t. It was birds of every stripe that made our journey so rewarding. But for the record and as an exercise in nostalgia here is a library of warblers.

Our starter was a Mourning Warbler found along a trail at the edge of a sphagnum bog not far from home. It was lifer for Dan and just as special for me. Although Mourning Warblers are around, they are not common and I rarely see one. At this site we also heard a Common Yellowthroat, always an engaging bird and the first of many more to come.

We spent our first overnight near Point Pelee and passed the afternoon in this legendary bird-magnet. There were suggestions of a Cerulean warbler but we couldn’t find it but a while later we were held spellbound by a couple of Prothonotary Warblers holding off intruders in their preferred dark, waterlogged, woodland home.

The second day we spent in richly agricultural southern Michigan visiting three sites: Sharonville State Game Area, Watkins Lake State Park and Nan Weston Nature Preserve. The morning was low on warblers but sensational on many other fronts. We added Yellow Warbler without difficulty and in the heat of the afternoon I heard a couple of Ovenbirds singing in the otherwise quiet, green forests at Nan Weston.

On day-three our goal was to explore Shiawassee National Wildlife Refuge, but first we prowled up and down Embury Road near Chelsea, a switchback of a road through quiet woodlands, we were seeking (and found) Cerulean Warblers. We also added three more new warblers that morning: Hooded Warbler (heard but not seen), Blue-winged Warbler and American Redstart. The afternoon at Shiawassee was for waterfowl but we also found more Common Yellowthroats, Prothonotary Warblers and Yellow Warblers along a woodland trail.

Nayanquing Wildlife Refuge on the shore of Lake Huron was another waterfowl spot and held no new warblers for us but, just to add colour, we topped up on Common Yellowthroats and Yellow Warblers. We made a side-trip along a nearby woodland edge, reported to be a spot to find Golden-winged Warblers; we didn’t but instead found a Blue-winged Warbler, our first Chestnut-sided Warbler and a brief and shadowy Mourning Warbler.

The next day was to be the culmination of our trip. We headed to Hartwick Pines State Park in countryside more reminiscent of northern Ontario where Kirtland’s Warbler was an easy find. It’s a pilgrimage bird for many and I was in the company of a score of checklisters. It was the Kirtland’s we were after but brief appearances by a Palm Warbler and a singing Nashville Warbler were welcome sightings nevertheless.

That afternoon we tracked down a pair of beautiful Golden-winged Warblers Keeping company with Chestnut-sided Warblers and American Redstarts. At our otherwise unremarkable motel, afternoon Pine Warblers sang from the White Pines around us.

On Dan’s last 24 hours in Ontario and before delivering him at the airport I was able to show him three each of Northern Waterthrush and book-ending the week, a couple of splendid, singing Canada Warblers.

I make that seventeen warbler species; perhaps we should have found Black and White, Yellow-rumped and Magnolia Warblers had we scoured appropriate habitat. Dan clung to a really long-shot hope, a Connecticut Warbler, but no. Yellow Warblers, American Redstarts and Common Yellowthroats were the warbler lubricant that kept things moving along, they were part of the background pretty much every day and at almost every place.

June 7 2017 Hartwick Pines State Forest, Michigan. There is absolutely nothing to seeing a Kirtland’s Warbler.  They are very rare it’s true, they’re also protected and cosseted so, if you want to see one, just about the only way, certainly the best way to get a glimpse, is to show up just before seven a.m at the visitor centre at northern Michigan’s Hartwick Pines State Park and join the guided tour, it’s free and warbler-encounters pretty well guaranteed. A young naturalist briefs you on the circumstances of the Kirtland’s Warbler’s ecology, history, population crash and subsequent recovery, and then off you go.

You join a car-convoy of birders and in no time at all you’re at a site where Kirtland’s Warblers breed and where males of the species sing lustily.  It’s all very easy.  That’s what we did today and the only struggle was in actually laying eyes on one, you could hear them all around, often just a few feet away, but the pines, though short, are thick and the birds rarely obvious.

The thing about Kirtland’s Warblers is that there are only about two thousand in the world; about the same as the population of Grayling, the sprawling crossroads of a town closest to the State Forest.  They spend the winter in the Bahamas (the birds not the people of Grayling), nest in northern Michigan and make an unaided two-thousand five-hundred kilometre journey twice a year.  Such a journey is not particularly extraordinary in the bird world; other species fly the length of the American continents, south to north and back.  But what is extraordinary is that the Kirtland’s Warbler came close to extinction. European settlers thought they knew better and catastrophically disrupted a few natural underpinnings of the Kirtlands’ habitat and breeding biology.  By the mid 1900s the species’ population fell close to three hundred and it seemed doomed.

To the great credit of Michigan Audubon and the state’s Department of Natural Resources the free-fall has been reversed and the Kirtland’s Warbler seems to be recovering, but it’s still a very rare bird and we were privileged to see it, stage-managed though it was. It was unequivocally Bird of the Day until…

….We went looking for a Golden-winged Warbler and found it too. Truth is we’d heard where we might find them and made our way to an obscure gravel road. We parked in the shade, scratched together some bits and pieces of lunch and then paced up and down, looking, listening and enjoying the time and place. In a half an hour or so of trying we found Chestnut-sided Warblers, American Redstarts, and Hairy Woodpeckers. We were far from discouraged but wondered just a little whether the directions we’d been given were all they were cracked up to be.

Golden-winged Warblers sing after a fashion, it’s really just a short series of buzzes, like a worrisome electrical short; and harder to hear the older you get. But then…there it was overhead and anxious. It stayed in one place just long enough for us to get our binoculars on it and then it zipped across the road looping around to another half-hidden vantage spot. A short maddening pause, long enough for us to spot it and then off again, around and around it went. Eventually we got used to each other and things settled down and we realized there were two of them and they were carrying food to nestlings somewhere nearby.

The sight of a Golden-winged Warbler always makes me catch my breath and it indisputably fits in the category of pretty warblers. It is also in my personal collection of ‘Warblers I never get a decent photo of.” Here’s couple: one above from this day and one below from a year ago. Both lovely to look at but I recommend seeing a real one in the open and sunlit; if it’ll stay still that is.

June 6 2017. Hartwick Pines State Forest, Michigan. Today’s Bird of the Day came as a surprise.  A complete surprise because the idea of northern finches was quite possibly one of the furthest things from my mind; after all we had spent the day in pursuit of what I suppose you might call the birds of summer: warblers, vireos, grebes and the like. Then suddenly right in front of us was an Evening Grosbeak, a bird I associate with winter.

We had come to the end of a longish trek north and decided to visit the visitor centre at Hartwick Pines State Park in north-central Michigan.  The countryside had changed over the past half day from largely prosperous agriculture beset by broadleaf forest to sandy and dry with impoverished or half-abandoned farms; altogether more northern.

At the park’s visitor centre a staff member was telling us about the area and what to expect.  As part of her explanation she pointed casually at a loaded bird feeder where a male Evening Grosbeak sat happily gulping down sunflower seed.  It was a complete reset to the day: it cast aside memories of Mourning Warblers, American Bitterns and Ring-necked Pheasant any of which otherwise might have been my Bird of the Day; this was a late entrant and totally unrehearsed.

Evening Grosbeaks are gorgeous birds, to look at anyway, for all I know they may be boreal thugs.  The photo above is of a male and female on one of the feeders and the one below a male.

A few odds and ends about Evening Grosbeaks: It’s been decades since I last saw one; it may have been a spring day thirty-five years ago when I last saw a small flock of them.  A scattering of buttercup yellow birds on a gravel road busily picking grit; an old and vivid memory. 

Evening Grosbeaks are a close relative of Europe’s Hawfinch, two of three birds in the genus Cocothraustes (a melodious and somehow self-descriptive word!)  The three in the family are: Hawfinch – Coccothraustes coccothraustes; Evening Grosbeak – Coccothraustes vespertinus; and the Mexico’s Hooded Grosbeak – Coccothraustes abeillei. The Evening Grosbeak is a year-round bird of the northern coniferous forests and one of the best (and easiest) ways to see them is on-line via a web-cam set up in a northern Ontario back yard and streamed on Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s website (Here’s a link , click on Ontario Feeder Watch, but at the time of writing it is showing archived material).

5 June 2017. Pinkney Recreation Area, Michigan.There is a condition known as ‘warbler neck’, it affects northern hemisphere birders, older ones more so than younger, and is especially prevalent in May and June. It’s usually felt as painful vertebral torsion caused by prolonged binocular searching for warblers in the forest canopy directly overhead.  It can be eased by going home.

Dan and I endured a long episode of warbler neck today.  We were in a gloriously green hardwood forest searching for Cerulean Warblers.  It was cool, spring-jacket weather, mosquito-free and the forest was ringing with bird song: Scarlet Tanagers, Yellow-throated Vireos, Baltimore Orioles, Tufted Timice and Eastern Wood Peewees.  We endured the discomfort because we could hear Cerulean Warbler song, at least I could.

Few warblers are as sought after as Cerulean Warblers, perhaps because they are so hard to spot and are uncommon; maybe the latter is a consequence of the former. And yet – we succeeded.  It took a little while, too often the birds were fast-moving silhouettes against a flat-grey morning sky.  We pieced together bits and pieces, small clues as to identification until we felt sure we had a Cerulean, then finally a male dropped low enough, unobstructed and lodged on a big old branch such that its markings and its blues, greys and whites became clear against a dark background. Cerulean Warbler identification clinched!  Unlike the previous two days when we have found target birds quickly and almost without effort (Mourning Warbler and Henslow’s Sparrow respectively), the Cerulean Warbler was a struggle, deservedly My Bird of the Day. Here’s an unsatisfactory photo from a couple of years ago..

It’s worth noting here that in the informal birder circles of southern Ontario there are a number of what I’d call trophy birds: Cerulean Warbler would be one, Acadian Flycatcher another, Prothonotary Warblers for sure, and Mourning Warbler probably.  There are many other rare and unusual birds of course, too many to list here, but they’d be birds that just don’t belong and are occasionally seen on migration or perhaps are an off-course wanderer.  Trophy birds on the other hand are known or suspected to be around but are few and far between and always hard to see. The four noted above are all in the bag for us on this trip and a few more wait to be found: Least Bittern, Connecticut Warbler and Golden-winged Warbler.  What are our chances?  Right now I’d say good, very poor and fair in that order.

Now 24 hours later, I can report that we could not find a Least Bittern despite our best efforts patrolling the margins of a likely marsh at the Nyanquing Wildlife Refuge near Saginaw, Michigan.  It wasn’t all lost though, an American Bittern flew up from a trailside waterhole and I could hear the hauntingly weird song of Pied-billed Grebes.

Birding has been called a sport, I’m not sure about that but it sure has its challenges.

June 4 2017.  Sharronville State Game Area, Michigan. I wouldn’t say I was skeptical of Dan and his quest for yet another sparrow for his collection and for flying all the way from British Columbia to see one, but I’ve seen lots of sparrows and by and large they they are well, just little brown jobs; not all, just most.  But to be fair, look back in these pages and you’ll probably find I’ve shone a spotlight on Grasshopper Sparrows, Savannah Sparrows and Fox Sparrows from time to time, and maybe others. But here we are, in Michigan, and Henslow’s Sparrow is on the ‘must see’ list. 

I hadn’t realized until much later today that Henslow’s Sparrow is a species in trouble.  Populations have been in a steep decline over the past century, in fact Henslow’s have suffered the fastest rate of decline of any grassland bird: drainage, degradation and conversion of suitable grasslands from lush hay fields is the problem.   So seeing a few Henslow’s today and even getting a few decent shots is, I’ve come to realize, something of a privilege.

It’s not all about sparrows this Michigan trip, Dan has plans that include seeing Cerulean Warblers, Least Bitterns and Golden-winged Warblers among others.

Henslow’s Sparrows were exactly where Dan’s research said they’d be, in an unmowed, lush and rolling hayfield.  But just being there is not enough, from our point of view (literally and figuratively) we had to see it too, a diminutive little bird that barely pops it head up above the grass to sing a clipped, reedy ‘seep’ note at four or five second intervals. Fortunately that note carries well given reasonably quiet conditions and I had no trouble detecting it and to my astonishment pinpointing its direction and distance from us.

Okay, so we knew in which direction it lay, but spotting a mouse-sized bird in knee-deep grass (tick-infested by the way) where horizons are short and steep was another problem.  But luck was on our side and after making two trips (once early and then again mid-evening) we’d had several sightings, some at quite close range.

The Henslow’s Sparrow and its close relative the Grasshopper Sparrow are both rather pale and undistinguished looking, small heads and an odd, flat-headed profile; I knew kids like that at school; all nose. The Grasshopper Sparrow too has a tiny song: thin, wispy and a bit like the buzz of a grasshopper. For little-brown-jobs they are really rather cute.

There was lot lots more in the day.  After we’d made our morning sightings of the Henslow’s Sparrow (plus Sandhill Crane, Grasshopper, Song, Savannah and Field Sparrows too). We stopped at a road that cut across a marsh and along with the expected Swamp Sparrows, Common Yellowthroats and Yellow Warblers, found an Acadian Flycatcher, – which excited me no end because they are a rarity in Ontario and a bird I’d like to get to know much better.

Third stop and last before lunch, was an old rail line that cut across an area of grasslands and lakes and here we found several Dickcissels – another rarity in Ontario and also on Dan’s must-find list.  It was an almost-first for me, I recall stumbling across one not far from home several decades ago.  This time, instead of the confusion that surrounds an unexpected sighting, we were able to spend quite a bit of time watching and listening to the Dickcissels. It’s an attractive and melodious bird, singing a lisping see-see-DTIK-DTIK-dtik si-si-si-si, a song from which gets its name.  At this same site were Bobolinks, a family group of Brown Thrashers and just disappearing into the forest, a Pileated Woodpecker. Oh and lots more, this was the best of June birding.

And all of that was just the morning. The afternoon was hot and tiring but reasonably productive and in the evening we went out at dusk in search of (successfully) singing Whip-poor-wills and Chuck-wills-widows. Against all of that competition ,something like fifty-five species, the Henslow’s Sparrows held its own as My Bird of the Day.