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.