A bell-like trill, part II

[vaneramos]

Singing somewhere up there


Today will be my last day alone for a while. I decided to mix housework and pleasure. This afternoon, with self-indulgence in mind, I drove to Wellington County Agreement Forest. On a weekday it would be virtually empty. With sun high in the sky, I would have enough light under the canopy for self-portraiture.

As I stepped out of the car, a chorus of bell-like trills assailed my ears. I stood in a pine plantation....

Pine warblers? Here was a chance to train my ear for the Breeding Bird Survey.

I spent a half hour trudging and peering through binoculars while mosquitoes gathered around. Pine warblers are shy, foraging high in the trees, close to the trunk. If I approached too closely, their songs would move, invisibly as spirits.

Finally I gave up. Traipsing out of the plantation, I gave one backward glance for good measure. Then my eye glimpsed movement. It took a couple tries with the binoculars, but finally I saw his yellow-green face on a high branch: a nondescript bird, but singing that characteristic song that has puzzled me for years.

Last month a friend on my list wondered whether LiveJournal answers prayers. I think it does.





Posted this morning in free_write: Stories about god

Comments

[vaysha.livejournal.com]

Oh Van, the free write story was wondrous- I am glad you thought to link it here. I hope your day alone did your spirit good!
Thank you for being you, someone I consider to be a wonderful creative human being.

[vaneramos.livejournal.com]

I had some wild, blasphemous thoughts churning around this morning. It feels so real when I break through the crystal prison of my own politeness and write things like that. I hadn't posted in free_write since October, but it was the perfect outlet. I'm glad you liked it! Your creativity seems wonderful to me, too.

[leafshimmer.livejournal.com]

what a luscious portrait!

It makes me regret all the more bitterly that I have not a clue when I'm going to see you again!

[vaneramos.livejournal.com]

I will see you in good time.

[bill-bill.livejournal.com]

Ah, the trilling of the pine warblers, the soundtrack to my youth and young adulthood in the summertime pine woods of the deep south. Hot, steamy days, sand roads, wiregrass, chiggers, droning cicadas, buzzing flies, an indigo bunting here, a carolina wren there, a summer tanager, a white-eyed vireo, maybe a distant hooded warbler from a patch of bottomland off beyond the pines, and always, everywhere, the pine warblers.

[vaneramos.livejournal.com]

Wow, that's amazing. I don't encounter them very often here. Most of the forest in cottage country is mixed deciduous and coniferous, too dense for pine warblers I guess. I usually only see them at migrantion, but we have all kinds of warblers nesting right around the cottage: black-throated blue, black-throated green, Blackburnian, magnolia, yellow-rumped and black-and-white for starters.

I just have one spot at the beginning of my route where there are a number of mature white pines and I always hear pine warblers singing, but I could never get a look at one. The first couple of years I mistook them for juncos or chipping sparrows. Then I figured out what they were, but I've still never spotted one after five or six years of running the route.

So it was a bit of irony that I'd written about this problem the other day, only to see one in a pine plantation yesterday, right outside the city, 300 kilometres away from my route.

[bill-bill.livejournal.com]

Pine warblers really love those southern yellow pines, especially loblolly and longleaf. They're part of a whole suite of species that are characteristic of and most abundant in the southern pine woods, very common ones like pine warblers and brown-headed nuthatches, and localized ones like bachman's sparrows and red-cockaded woodpeckers. The more appalachian and northern pines (white, virginia, pitch, red, jack) seem to be a secondary habitat for the pine warblers, and don't support most of those other species at all.

Most of those other warblers come through here only on migration, though we have a few nesting black-and-whites on the farm here (along with the southern warblers like hooded, kentucky, parula, louisiana waterthrush, etc.). The northern ones nest closest to here in the southern Appalachians along the TN/NC line and in far N. Georgia, mostly above 2500.' Some like the blackburnians and canadas aren't usually found in summer below 4000'.

Warblers... one of the nice thngs about being back in the east!

FYI I called the Tennessee coordinator about that unassigned route in middle Tennessee, he just called me back and we're gonna try a mad scramble to get the maps to me so we can get it run before the season is over. Thanks for the headsup! Interesting note, that route is not far from all the faeries over at Short Mountain...

[vaneramos.livejournal.com]

Hurray, I'm glad that worked out! Someday I must make a trip south. Some of the species you mentioned are unfamiliar. Extreme southwestern Ontario, where I grew up, is in the Carolinian Forest zone, but it's excellent farmland so only about 3 per cent of the original woodland remains. As a result many associated bird species like the Prothonotary warbler, Carolina wren and red-headed woodpecker are endangered or threatened in Canada.

We had a Kentucky warbler on my mother's garden once when I was a teenager, and I've seen the hooded warbler and Louisiana waterthrush at Point Pelee (Northern waterthrush is another one that nest on our cottage property) along with some of the other southern types. The parula's range covers Central Ontario, but I have yet to see one around the cottage, in fact I don't think I've ever had one on my BBS route.

I haven't travelled much as an adult, so most of my birding has been done here in Ontario. I'm planning a camping trip to the Maritimes this August with my daughters, and hoping to check a couple hotspots along the Nova Scotia coast.

I didn't know you were acquainted with the faeries. I'm close friends with bitterlawngnome, in fact his partner djjo is my boyfriend. I went to Amber Fox with Bill once in October 2003. The main reason I haven't been back is that I'm very attached to my own cottage, and I become a full-time "single" dad for most of the summer.