June 12,2010, Black-throated Blues

Our ongoing quest to confirm breeding of Black-throated Blue Warbler, in Ohio, continued Saturday. After witnessing the astounding changes in Stebbin’s Gulch we hiked to the location where we have been finding these birds for the past 3 years. We needed something more than male birds singing on territory. The history of this species in Ohio has been of bachelors in June. Never a female.

We arrived in the target area and prepared to spend several hours on site. It was not long before we heard it:

zurr zurr zreeee

By now, after 3 years, exciting, but not unusual. Then we heard Winter Wrens in duet. There is nothing like it in the natural world. To hear a Winter Wren singing is special by itself. A song that is a concert in 15 seconds. So rich in notes and tempo. But when one picks up where the other leaves off, there is an extended song which is more beautiful than any human composition.

The Black-throated Blues were not going out of their way to be obvious. Sometimes it was 15 to 20 minutes between times we would hear or see one. My friend Frank managed to get a few pictures of a male. But he has forgotten to put in a fresh battery, and his camera is giving him trouble with auto focus. The images are diagnostic but not all that great. My friend Tom has found another male in a location about 80 meters away. He informs us via mobile phone.

We are spread out. Waiting, watching, listening. Frank and I are in the middle of a grape vine/raspberry tangle. Typical nesting habitat for Black-throated Blues. Tom is down the slope looking over a similar tangle.

***

I have the dangerous habit of calling birds naked eye. People who spend a lot of time in the field with me, are often amazed at my abiltiy. Not to be flip, but I even amaze myself sometimes. I don’t know what I see that leads me to the call, but I somehow get it right. But I have spent thousands of hours in the field and a lifetime in the woods. So I guess I have learned things I don’t know. A paradox but there is no other way to describe it.

So when I saw a bird moving through the tangle and determined it was a female Black-throated Blue, I was pretty skeptical of myself. I don’t know what I saw about that fast moving bird. I have a near photographic short term memory. In my mind’s eye I can still see it. Was it shape and movement and nothing else? But I knew. Then it was gone.

“I just saw a female” I whisper shouted to Frank about 20 meters away. “Where?” “Here, moving through the tangle.”

Frank came over and we stood together watching as only intent observers can. Talking in the barest whispers. Frank has his camera ready. Waiting...

Then suddenly, an almost invisible flash of movement down into the vegetation, 5 meters to our left. Popping just off the ground. We move in silent unison to get closer. “Frank!” I whisper, “ A male is on the ground right here!” I am pointing less than a meter away, looking at a male as he moves along the ground. “I’m looking at a female!” Frank replies.

I look over. He has his camera up and I see movement just in front of him.

Then they are gone, as only birds can disappear.

Frank did not get a picture. The dying battery on his camera caused his auto focus to malfunction, or his 600 mm lens was incapable of focusing at 2 meters. Still for the first time in Ohio history, we have female Black-throated Blue Warblers, during nesting season, in appropriate habitat.

One step closer...