Yellow birds and frass

Yellow-throated Vireo Vireo flavifrons
(with its chunky shrike-ish bill showing well)

Yellow-throated Vireo Vireo flavifrons

It was nuts-to-butts on the narrow trail

Gypsy Moth caterpillar Lymantria dispar

Gypsy Moth caterpillar Lymantria dispar
(in a miniature landscape of destruction)

Endless drifts of frass

Leaf litter from the defoliated trees

  A female Hooded Warbler was found by Raphaël Millot on Mount Royal a couple of days ago…great stuff as always from the French wonderboy. Unlike the male that JSM and I re-discovered back in 2017, this one was a female…on a nest no less! Yesterday morning there was a predictable skirmish rank of twitchers queued up along the narrow forest trail.

  Yes, I was there, so I was a twitcher too, so I guess I’m like the idiot stuck in traffic complaining about all the other people that trapped me there, like I’m not part of the whole thing.

  But yeah, the situation is not ideal for the bird. There were only a couple of spots where the bird could be seen when it came back from foraging, and it seemed like the folks perched in those prime spots were sort of camping out all day, leaving long bell curve tails of unfulfilled birders on either side of them.

  Perhaps as a result of that situation, apparently folks have started trimming back the bushes around the nest to offer better looks for photogs. Very uncool.

  Overall I felt gross at this twitch. Maybe I’ll ditch the twitch, and leave rarities for the days when I can be a finder again, with my own little unbirded patch. Maybe this record should have been suppressed, straight up, for the good of the bird. Happened all the time in Korea. Who knows. Maybe I’m too uptight.

  In the cems, got good looks at the resident pair of raspy Yellow-throated Vireos. Lovely. A Black-billed Cuckoo was briefly heard ghosting from somewhere in the middle distance.

  I hadn’t been to the cems in over a month, and holy crap, the trees there are being mauled by the Gypsy Moth caterpillars. The frass (caterpillar shit) was falling like a steady hail, and when the wind blew, the leaves fell like it was autumn…except it was chopped up bits of green leaves. Weird. An alarming number of trees were almost completely defoliated. Too bad there weren't a few thousand more Black-billed Cuckoos around...

  Thanks for George for the gen.

Ceruleans on the border

Cerulean Warbler Setophaga cerulea

Cerulean Warbler Setophaga cerulea

Eastern Bluebird Sialia sialis

Master of camouflage

Yellow-bellied Sapsucker Sphyrapicus varius

Whoops, I'm on the border...

  Up bright and crazy early this morn, to strike south with George — about as far south as you can get in Québec — the George Montgomery Sanctuary in Philipsburg, just a hair north of the border from Missisquoi National Wildlife Refuge. We racked up 50-ish species on a morning that saw the heat, humidity, and bugs increase with each hour closer to high-sun.

  The bustling dawn chorus was lovely to take in, but it also reminded me that I have ears of crap, especially when it comes to warblers. I suspect that my auditory memory gets flushed down the shitter every winter, and I have to re-learn it all again in spring. Give me a millisecond on a blurred skulker with the bins, and I’m all over it. A common bird singing overhead for five minutes? Sad shrug.

  The target bird of the day: Cerulean Warbler. We heard at least two where the blue trail circles a ridge, so we staked out for a while, with no luck. We decided to also circle the ridge, and when we almost completed the loop, we found ourselves much closer to where the Ceruleans were singing. Pretty soon, one was singing from a tree very close by, and we got quick looks for about a minute, before it vanished in a puff of blue smoke. Got off a few dodgy record shots in a challenging mix of canopy gloom and stained-glass back-bright. George got some cracking recordings as well. Been a long time coming for this bird, high-five! Cerulean blue…cerulean blue…(X-files reference)…

  Lesser highlights included low single digits of Black-billed Cuckoo, Yellow-throated Vireo, Wood Thrush, and Red-bellied Woodpecker.

  Oh yeah, at one point I found myself in an odd clearing in the woods — like a power-line cut with no power lines. Then I saw a small white concrete marker, and spied a razor wire compound shimmering in the distance. Oops, I guess I almost bumbled over the Canada-USA border, hee hee.