Golden-winged Warbler
To know them is to love them. But first, we must be aware of their existence.
(Listen to the radio version here.)
My friend Paula Lozano lives near Cleveland but has family in Port Wing, Wisconsin, so about once a year, she comes to town and we go birding together. On Wednesday, June 12, she and I birded at a few of our favorite spots in Port Wing. We saw two species I couldn’t have imagined ever seeing in Port Wing during the first decades I birded there, and a third that had long been extremely rare in summer. Trumpeter Swans and Wild Turkeys had been entirely extirpated from Wisconsin until reintroduction programs began.
Nesting Sandhill Cranes were once very hard to find in Wisconsin and most of Minnesota, but research leading to habitat protection and better management practices, much of it spearheaded by the International Crane Foundation and funded by Minnesota and Wisconsin’s Nongame Wildlife Programs, have brought cranes back to enrich our lives. The pair we saw were at the Michele Wheeler Wetland Restoration area. I’m not sure where they are in the nesting process, but we studied them for quite a few minutes without detecting a chick.
Paula and I came upon a porcupine strolling across a gravel road, apparently picking up some of the grit—the little guy didn’t seem to object much to paparazzi.
A male Ruffed Grouse crossed another gravel road. His head looked bizarrely small until we looked closely and discovered that he was almost bald. This is the season when adult grouse molt into new plumage, though I never realized individuals molted their head feathers all at once as some Blue Jays and Northern Cardinals do. We knew he was a male because he fluffed out the ruff a few times.
Pairs of Cedar Waxwings were all about.
I was thrilled to find a few Cliff Swallows building nests on buildings in the marina area—they used to be abundant in Port Wing when I started birding, but I haven’t seen them there in at least a decade.
We saw lots of Bobolinks.
A vociferous Western Meadowlark let me photograph him at pretty close range, and then allowed me to record his songs with my cellphone.
But the highlight of the day for me was the Golden-winged Warbler.
We (or in my case, my Merlin app) heard several, and at one spot, my own poor ears could actually detect a very cooperative nearby male—at least, I could hear the final notes of his song. The first note has been out of my hearing range for years unless I’m listening to a recording wearing headphones with the volume cranked up.
While I was photographing him, Paula, whose ears are much better than mine, thought she heard a Blue-winged Warbler. I didn’t hear it and Merlin didn’t pick it up, so I’m hopeful it was just an aberrant Golden-winged Warbler song. Blue-winged Warblers are wonderful birds, but their northward range expansion has come directly at the expense of Golden-winged Warblers.
The two species hybridize so frequently that the two most common hybrid plumages even have names (Lawrence’s and Brewster’s Warblers).
In May 2019, I saw and photographed a beautiful hybrid form that was neither.
It was what eBird reviewer Louis Bevier said was a very rare backcross hybrid. (Here’s a link to my blog post about this bird.)
Because of all kinds of factors such as hybridization and competition with Blue-winged Warblers, habitat degradation, decreasing numbers of insects, and climate change, the North American Breeding Bird Survey estimates a 68 percent loss of Golden-winged Warblers between 1966 and 2014, one of the steepest declines of any North American songbird.
So far, Minnesota hasn’t shown a decline. Partners In Flight sets the current total population of Golden-winged Warblers at 390,000, of which 220,000 live in Minnesota and 78,000 in Wisconsin, meaning our two states hold 75 percent of the entire breeding population in the known universe.
Most people, even those living in the heart of where these beautiful birds are most abundant, have never heard of, much less consciously experienced, a Golden-winged Warbler. They’re quite tiny—many weighing less than a third of an ounce and the heaviest not reaching half an ounce—and they spend most of their lives in foliage.
They occasionally sit in a bare branch to sing for a bit, but their pleasing, high-frequency little ditty is entirely out of the hearing range of many people, and for those who can hear it, the song usually disappears into the background soundtrack of the outdoors. Without Paula and my Merlin app, I would have been completely unaware of all but one of the Golden-wings we found Wednesday.
A person in this country can be extremely well-educated by modern standards yet not be familiar with the plants and animal life most abundant within a mile of their home. Those of us who live in the heart of the Golden-winged Warbler range bear much of the responsibility to protect it, but we only work to protect the things we love or appreciate, and to love or appreciate anything, we must not just be aware of its existence but know something about it.
I’m delighted when anyone tells me they’ve discovered and use the free Merlin app to see the names of all the birds singing around them. Awareness of the birds around us is hardly enough to save them, but it’s an essential first step.
I hope I'm never too late to see one. I haven't yet!!
About waxwings, an ornithology professor of a friend said long ago that if you see a starling in a norther flock of Cedar Waxwings in winter, it may be a Bohemian Waxwing!