Pine warblers a winter treat for bird watchers: Nature News
I try not to get jaded about my backyard birds, but sometimes I find myself thinking “just another cardinal” or “I’d love to see something more exotic.”
Most of us already have a spectacular array of birds in our winter backyards. We get a variety of striking woodpeckers (downy, hairy, red-bellied, and pileated, even the occasional yellow-bellied sapsucker) vibrant cardinals, purple finches, huge flocks of goldfinch and noisy blue jays. Really, I shouldn’t want more, but when something unusual shows up, it is such a treat.
One of my highlights this year has been a pine warbler. These birds are not supposed to be here in the winter. They are seasonal migrants, migrating from the northern United States and Canada down to wintering grounds in the Southeast. As their name suggests, pine warblers prefer to live in pine forests and are relatively common up here. I hear them in the spring and summer, but rarely see them as they like to forage high up in the canopy.
According to the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology, the pine warbler is the only warbler that eats large quantities of seeds, primarily those of pines. This seed-eating ability means pine warblers sometimes visit bird feeders. Since I don’t keep a feeder up in the summer, I didn’t know this until this winter when, there it was, almost hidden in a huge flock of goldfinches.
I was curious about just how unusual this sighting was. Bird books all say pine warblers shouldn’t be here now. But if you check out ebird.org, an online database of bird sightings, you can find a handful reported every winter in the Seacoast area.
Have others been finding unseasonal birds in their backyards too? I asked Kristen Lamb, executive director of the Center for Wildlife in Cape Neddick, in York, Maine, what they were seeing.
Lamb said the center has “admitted a few species this winter that are considered well outside of their wintering grounds for our region, including an American woodcock and Eastern towhee. These species were both admitted in January, when historical data shows their winter range extending from Maryland to further south. This follows a trend of admitting bats, salamanders and frogs in January and February, following extended periods of 50-60 degree temperatures, which is unseasonable and unprecedented in recent history. In addition to admitting species that in our 38 years of records were typically these species that should be hibernating or brumating (brumation is like hibernation but specific to reptiles) in the winter months, this winter we also admitted 64 dovekies in the months of December and January. Dovekies are a pelagic species typically found well offshore, but extreme temperature changes and the high winds that come with it blew droves of these penguin-like auks to land across the Eastern Seaboard and beyond. One dovekie was even admitted from Vermont!”
Should I be delighted or worried by this little pine warbler in my backyard? He (the yellow eye ring makes this one a male) seems healthy and given that seed-eating is normal for his species will probably be able to get adequate food. Perhaps he stayed because of the huge crop of pine seeds this year? It is likely he can survive the wintry conditions-while he looks diminutive to me, pine warblers are relatively chunky (which helps with the cold) as warblers go and are one of the most winter-hardy.
Finding this pine warbler at my feeder is a harbinger of things to come. As our winters get milder and at the same time more unstable, it is likely that we will see an increase in these unusual sightings in the future. We don’t know at this point how these shifts in migration, hibernation, and other seasonal patterns will impact our local wildlife. For better or worse, as Bob Dylan wrote, the times they are a-changin’.
Susan Pike, a researcher and an environmental sciences and biology teacher at Dover High School, welcomes your ideas for future column topics. Send your photos and observations to [email protected]. Read more of her Nature News columns at Seacoastonline.com and pikes-hikes.com, and follow her on Instagram @pikeshikes.