North on the Wing
Page 1
Scissor-tailed Flycatchers
Text and photographs © 2018 by Bruce M. Beehler
Illustrations © 2018 by John T. Anderton
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v5.1
a
In memory of Cary Baxter Beehler,
Edwin Way Teale, and Nellie Donovan Teale
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Wood Warblers of Eastern North America: A Life List
Introduction
ONE
Birds of Spring
TWO
The Texas Gulf Coast: First Landfall
THREE
The Coastal Oak Woods of Texas and Louisiana: Migrant Magnets
FOUR
The Low Country of Louisiana and Mississippi
FIVE
Piney Woods and Cypress Swamps
SIX
From the Confluence to the Headwaters
SEVEN
The Mysterious Northlands
EIGHT
Great Lakes Country
NINE
Adirondack Spring
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
References
WOOD WARBLERS OF EASTERN NORTH AMERICA
A Life List
The warblers are listed below in systematic order, following the treatment found in The Sibley Guide to Birds, which lists closely related species near one another and the most highly derived species toward the end of the sequence.
□ Ovenbird
□ Worm-eating Warbler
□ Louisiana Waterthrush
□ Northern Waterthrush
□ Golden-winged Warbler
□ Blue-winged Warbler
□ Black-and-white Warbler
□ Prothonotary Warbler
□ Swainson’s Warbler
□ Tennessee Warbler
□ Orange-crowned Warbler
□ Nashville Warbler
□ Connecticut Warbler
□ Mourning Warbler
□ Kentucky Warbler
□ Common Yellowthroat
□ Hooded Warbler
□ American Redstart
□ Kirtland’s Warbler
□ Cape May Warbler
□ Cerulean Warbler
□ Northern Parula
□ Magnolia Warbler
□ Bay-breasted Warbler
□ Blackburnian Warbler
□ Yellow Warbler
□ Chestnut-sided Warbler
□ Blackpoll Warbler
□ Black-throated Blue Warbler
□ Palm Warbler
□ Pine Warbler
□ Myrtle Warbler
□ Yellow-throated Warbler
□ Prairie Warbler
□ Black-throated Green Warbler
□ Canada Warbler
□ Wilson’s Warbler
INTRODUCTION
Blue-winged Warbler
An interest in nature leads you into a kind of enchanted labyrinth. You wander from corridor to corridor; one interest leads to another interest; one discovery to another discovery. It matters little where you begin.
—EDWIN WAY TEALE, Circle of the Seasons
In February 1947, the naturalist Edwin Way Teale and his wife, Nellie, took an adventurous automobile trip in search of nature. Driving on country roads through farmland and prairie, forest and marsh, mountains and swamp, the Teales tracked the progress of spring from the Florida Everglades to northern New England. Moving north as the days lengthened and warmed, songbirds of many species greeted the Teales through the American landscape. The Teales took in local history and culture and explored little-known green spaces as they followed the birds’ own journeys. The account of their travels, North with the Spring, the first of Edwin Way Teale’s grand quartet of seasonal natural-history travelogues, was published in 1951.
I first encountered Teale’s tale of spring migration in the late ’50s, when my mother read passages from it to me and my brother on our cozy living room sofa before bedtime. Our mother, a single parent who worked as a dental assistant to pay the bills, was rediscovering her own childhood love of nature through her avocational reading of Teale, Henry David Thoreau, Isaak Dinesen, Hal Borland, Elspeth Huxley, and others, prowling the local library in search of nature in the written word and bringing her discoveries home to share with us. Thus, long before I’d even decided to become an ornithologist, in the days when I was first exploring the nearby woods and fields, Teale’s migrant birds became nighttime visitors to our home through our mother’s reading.
At that time, the northern neighborhoods of Baltimore, where I grew up, were still dotted with forest tracts. Wood Thrushes sang from the shade of the woodsy stream bottoms, and coveys of Bobwhite Quail visited our backyard garden. My brother, Bill, and I were free to range widely for hours. When not in school, we children wandered, discovering the outdoors on our hikes to Tramp Rock in nearby Gilman Woods. Midway through spring, in their murmuring flocks, Myrtle Warblers flashed their golden rumps in Red Maples that were just starting to push out their pale pinkish-green leaves. Bill and I would take note of these northbound migrants as well as the monotonous but cheerful territorial singing of Northern Flickers. At the end of the day, we were called home by the sound of the brass school bell that our mother rang to signal us in for dinner.
In 2015, after a lifetime spent observing birds around the world, I decided to take a road trip up the Mississippi Valley to the Great North Woods to experience spring migration as the Teales had done, but along a different pathway. I would first meet the migrant birds on the coast of Texas after they had made their journey across the Gulf of Mexico, returning stateside from their tropical wintering grounds. Then, tracking spring’s march up through the continent, I would follow the migrants as they moved northward in fits and starts. I would meet these birds at an array of favored stopover sites and midcountry nesting spots from Texas to Canada, and I’d seek out the most peripatetic of the migrants on their nesting territories in the boreal forests of northern Ontario and high in the Adirondack Mountains of northern New York State. I would travel the backroads and camp in the woods. Each night, from the comfort of my tent, I would listen to the last of the evening’s birdsong, and each morning I’d wake to their cheerful dawn voices.
My trip had several purposes beyond harkening back to the Teales’ own journey. As a practicing field naturalist, I wanted to experience, first-hand, spring migration at its most effulgent—right thr
ough the country’s midsection. I wanted to witness spring’s procession up the great riverway and spend time in the prettiest patches of green scattered up and down the Mississippi. As a research biologist, I also hoped to learn about the people who are studying migratory birds in the field. And, having experienced first-hand the long-term declines of migratory birds, I wanted to see the work that various institutions are doing to restore migration to its former abundance.
I planned to focus my hundred-day birding excursion on the wood warblers. These brightly patterned songbirds constitute the heart of the continent’s avian migratory system, and their well-being is a bellwether for the health of other bird species and of the land itself. Thirty-seven species of wood warblers breed in eastern North America, and I wanted to search out and observe each in its breeding habitat. But could I find all of them on their nesting territories in a single field trip? Whether or not I could, I knew that my search would lead me to the finest natural places along my transect, and that on my hunt I would encounter many other fascinating birds and all sorts of wildlife and surprising natural phenomena.
At the end of the northern leg of my long circuit lay Ontario, that great boreal nesting ground of the wood warblers. I’d wondered about it for decades, wanting to spend time there in late spring, when the male warblers are singing loudly and establishing territories. But northern Ontario was something of a natural-history black hole. It is still undeveloped country, lightly settled Ojibway First Nations traditional lands, with Black Bears and Moose, Timber Wolves and Wolverines. I had a hunch that the region—north-country wilderness rich in big game—might produce an extravaganza of wood warblers, so I planned to drive up to the very end of the Nord Road and set up camp at the height of songbird breeding season.
As a coda, meant to complete my thirty-seven-species warbler checklist, I planned to end my field trip in the Adirondacks, where I would climb a mountain I had last climbed forty years ago. The last quest bird on the list, the Blackpoll Warbler, would await me on that mountaintop. I had spent my childhood summers hiking in the Adirondacks, a vast forest landscape that left an indelible impression on me; I even wrote a book about Adirondack birds that I published in 1978. Yet it had been nearly half a century since I had spent serious time there, and so to complete my springtime quest I would climb the mountain that I’d first climbed in 1967, and camp in a place where I’d last camped in 1977. I would see first-hand how the park’s forests and birdlife had fared since I had last worked there. What surprises—good or bad—would I find upon my return?
But the true motivation for my trip was, of course, the fact that I am and remain a lifelong birdwatcher. From my boyhood years in Baltimore and my summers spent in the Adirondacks to my working years spent in the rainforests of New Guinea, I have studied birds both professionally and avocationally for more than half a century. Over the years, watching birds on spring mornings has created enduring memories of the annual passage of migration.
On May 6, 1967, I stood in the creek-bottom forest near my grandparents’ home, with a pair of heavy 7x50 binoculars that my grandfather had loaned me. It was a Saturday morning—the day of Maryland’s annual May Count of birds—and I was surveying birds in this north Baltimore forest remnant. My keen fifteen-year-old ears picked up an unrecognized birdsong in the canopy vegetation: bizz-buzz. What was it? I focused the clunky field glasses on the singer, a small yellow bird with blue-gray wings and white wing-bars, perched on a twig about thirty feet up. Plate 50 of Roger Tory Peterson’s Field Guide to the Birds confirmed it: this was a Blue-winged Warbler, and it was Life-Bird number 230 for me. Checking my field guide was simply pro forma; like any young birder, I voraciously consumed ornithological reference books and had learned the local birds cold before I’d seen even a small fraction of them. My passion was to see in the wild the birds that I had learned by heart in evenings at home with my small collection of reference books. Birdwatching came to overshadow my other natural-history interests—minerals, fossils, and butterflies.
I recently leafed through the diary in which I’d documented that sighting of the Blue-winged Warbler. I have seen scores of Blue-winged Warblers since that day, but my first view of the little singing bird will remain forever burned in my memory. Indeed, the chief reward of springtime birdwatching is the well-etched memories of the sights and sounds of the species that migrate north each spring and south each fall. (By 2015, the time of my big field trip, I was having difficulty hearing the song of the Blue-winged Warbler as well as those of some other species that give very high-pitched vocalizations.)
The late 1950s and early 1960s, the decades of my childhood, witnessed a remarkable flowering of nature appreciation and environmentalism in the United States, prompted by Audubon magazine, Peterson’s field guides, and the work of an array of popular nature writers who included Teale, Hal Borland, Peterson, Rachel Carson, Louis Halle, and others. Local Audubon societies sponsored nature walks and hosted evening lectures by national luminaries, including Peterson and Teale. This spring tide of natural-history appreciation culminated with the first celebration of Earth Day, in April 1970. Through it all, I never forgot Teale’s vivid recounting of the waves of wood warblers sweeping northward through the regenerating upland forests of the Appalachian Mountains. He wrote of places I longed to visit and sights I dreamed of seeing. He planted seeds that lay dormant for decades.
College provided my escape from the parochial confines of life in an average East Coast town, and a postgraduate travel fellowship took me to New Guinea for fifteen months, where I practiced field ornithology without anyone looking over my shoulder. Because of that stint, I won a fellowship for a doctoral program in biology at Princeton, and after two years of coursework I returned to New Guinea for twenty-nine months spent studying birds of paradise in a patch of grand old-growth rainforest at an elevation where the climate year-round is reminiscent of mid-April in Washington, D.C. During my professional years, I mixed ornithological field studies with ecological research and nature conservation, working in a number of countries in tropical Asia and the Pacific, far from my Mid-Atlantic boyhood haunts. My mother was fascinated by my work but couldn’t completely grasp its details or its faraway locales. Instead she focused her love of nature close to home. She remained in Baltimore and continued birdwatching locally, while I traveled the world on ornithological and conservation-related pursuits. Yet her steadfast love of nature near home reminded me of its importance; the wonder of spring migration on the East Coast kept me loyal.
Fast-forward to May 11, 1995. I joined birding buddies Peter Kaestner, Chuck Burg, and John Anderton to crisscross the countryside northwest of D.C. in our first attempt at a “Warbler Big Day”—we were seeking as many species of migrant wood warblers as possible in a single frantic day, done not for some statewide census but strictly for fun. Starting well before dawn (warblers are at their most vocal and visible early), we visited forests along the Patuxent River, Little Bennett Regional Park, the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal, the Potomac River, and Sugarloaf Mountain in a race against time. We were lucky that the whole day was cool, misty, and damp, which encouraged the warblers to stay active and visible to our little party seeking to push the limits of the possible. That day we recorded five Blue-winged Warblers, plus 169 other individual warblers, totaling thirty-one different species, all of them migrants arriving from their various southern wintering areas in a blaze of colorful spring plumages and exuberant male territorial song. Recording more than thirty species of warblers in a day is a difficult feat, so we were elated by our accomplishment, which we have repeated only a few times since. For many of us, these annual Warbler Big Days have provided some of the most brilliant memories of our birding lives. Such days combine lovely verdant habitats, wildflowers, colorful birds, other wildlife, and fine companionship—the sort of experience I hoped to recapture on my big birding trip up the Mississippi.
The death of my mother in the spring of 2013 was another incentive for my journey. Her passing rekindle
d bittersweet recollections of childhood and my first encounters with nature: a Snout Butterfly! A fossilized Miocene-era crocodile tooth! A Pink Lady’s Slipper orchid! A singing Baltimore Oriole! Her death awakened, too, my memories of those evening readings of Teale and the other great naturalists. My thoughts returned to the Teales’ epic journey tracking spring’s passage northward to the Canadian border. For thirty-five years, I had worked in lands far from home and was able to pursue North American birds as a hobby for only a few days each spring. Now my approaching retirement promised freedom, and a partnership with the American Bird Conservancy allowed me to spend the entire spring of 2015 investigating America’s bird-migration spectacle.
My desire was not to replicate the Teales’ journey but to recraft it in a manner relevant to my own interests in Neotropical migratory songbirds and the conservation challenges they are facing in the twenty-first century. Teale had focused on the broad phenomenon of spring. My focus would be on the spring migration of birds. Teale had begun in Florida and pursued a route that trended southwest to northeast, but I believed that a route following the main stem of the Mississippi was more promising. Teale’s route ran the length of the Appalachians, but my goal was to follow the movement of the bulk of the songbirds coming from the Tropics. After I’d decided on my course, I worked with the American Bird Conservancy and the Smithsonian Institution, plus dozens of local specialists, to choose the places I should visit to find nature at its best. By the time I set down my maps, I’d charted a route that would take me through nineteen states plus a broad swath of Canada.
From the start, I’d planned to document my journey as Teale had done, taking readers along with me as I traveled with the spring songbird migration, painting a picture of life on the road and the sights and sounds of the bird species and the little-known places that I’d visit. And I planned to share what I learned from the people and institutions working to study, conserve, and restore America’s natural treasures. As a result, my story does not confine itself to migrant songbirds; it includes all sorts of birds, other wildlife, local history, foods, and stories, so that readers can learn, as the Teales did, the very flavor of the lands where I traveled and camped and birdwatched. Thus this is a book about far more than songbirds or a long-distance natural history road trip. It’s about the birdwatcher’s quest itself, and the scientific curiosity that it epitomizes, as I experienced it in a hundred days on the road with the birds.