10,000 Birds

I’ve just spent a rather interesting morning wandering round the John Heinz Wildlife Refuge in Philly (a trip report is coming soon) before working a flight back home to the UK in the early evening. Under cloudless skies (after a somewhat foggy start) I’d found some great birds, including such Nearctic beauties as Parula Warbler, Magnolia Warbler, male Black-throated Blue Warbler, and American Redstart as well as birds I see only irregularly including Scarlet Tanager, Carolina Chickadee, and Eastern Phoebe. To be honest though I didn’t find quite the numbers of migrants I’d been hoping for, and just when I was beginning to wonder if perhaps the reason was more to do with a lack of birding skills than a lack of birds I’d been fortunate enough to meet a local birder (the amiable Tony Croasland) who’d given me a run-down on the area’s protracted fall migration patterns and re-assured me that it wasn’t just my tired eyes missing waves of migrants passing by within inches…

The meeting had been very timely as about thirty minutes before I’d been disconcertingly stumped by what I’d assumed was a small warbler grubbing through some dense foliage - the bird in the photo below.

A drab Yellowthroat…

What, I’d thought to myself as I first glimpsed it moving towards me, is virtually unmarked with a yellowish throat, a pale eye ring, and a slender “warblery” shape? The answer seemed very likely to be a first-year female (the drabbest plumage any warbler ever wears belongs to a young female) Common Yellowthroat. For those of you who aren’t familiar with John Heinz WR it’s a remnant area of swampland and cattails next to Philadelphia International Airport, and as you might expect Yellowthroats are commonplace - I’d already seen about ten, and finding one more certainly wouldn’t be unexpected.

Ah, but pride comes before a fall (especially where Fall warblers and over-confident Brit birders are concerned). I may as well be honest here and say that I hadn’t even bothered to look at the bird through binoculars and had up to this point only seen it in the viewfinder of my camera (not the smartest of moves really). If the bird I’m “viewing” turns out to be something really good, I internally rationalise in situations like this, then I can fire off a few shots before it disappears and check its identification at my leisure later on. In this case though, I was pretty sure that all I was looking at was yet another Yellowthroat - what else has a yellowish throat, an eye-ring, and a slender shape - and it was hardly worth bothering photographing at all given that I was getting poor views and it was moving around in less-than-ideal light…

As my bird finally hopped for a brief moment into view I began to have doubts about what it was. Deep in the recesses of what passes for my conscious state on days like this I realised that something wasn’t quite right, but couldn’t figure out what. Was I perhaps looking at one of the Oporornis warblers? A flutter of excitement arose then subsided: no, even on the most off of off-days I couldn’t have turned this small passerine into a Mourning Warbler…

I didn’t have time to get my binoculars onto the bird before it disappeared, but fortunately I’d grabbed a few photos. Time to turn to the zoom button and have a good close look at any and every feature I’d managed to capture. And as soon as I did I had the answer to my conundrum…

…no, Charlie, a wren…

What has a yellowish throat, an eye-ring, and a slender shape - and bars on the wing and outer tail feathers which I’d have quickly seen if I HAD bothered to use my bins? A House Wren with light reflecting off the undergrowth colouring its underparts, that’s what. Oh well, lesson learnt - and as I often tell myself (and often go on to ignore) “Check, check, then check again”, especially during fall migration when anything could turn up. Muddling up a House Wren with a Yellowthroat is hardly a felony offence of course - but it doesn’t half make you wonder whether you should have walked by those hundreds of Song Sparrows quite so quickly I can tell you…