Bird of the Month: Black-throated Blue Warbler
Spring jewels of the forest
This is the month area birders live for. May, when beautiful songbirds travel through Erie heading to their nesting grounds to the north. All of them have on their "party clothes," which are their colorful breeding plumage.
One of the May jewels that visits Erie is the Black-throated Blue Warbler. This species is sexually dimorphic with the male and female strikingly different from one another. The male is truly distinctive: he is a bright blue on the head and back, with a clean white stomach and a black face and throat. The female has an olive-blue back and crown, white around the eyes and a yellow or dirty white chest and stomach. They both share a distinctive field mark – a small white patch mid-wing that's often called a handkerchief. This field mark helps to identify the more nondescript female.
Another delight of spring migration is birds singing their sweet songs regularly. In Black-throated Blues, it's the male that does most of the singing, although scientists have recorded the female singing on occasion. They sing a rising buzzy three- or five-note song that stops birders in their tracks for a look.
Black-throated Blue Warblers don't nest in Erie County often – the first documented nest in the county was in 2022. But they do nest nearby, especially in the higher elevations of Warren County. Their nesting range reaches from southern Ontario and Quebec, the New England states, and south through New York into Georgia along the Appalachian range. They winter on islands of the Caribbean Sea and in Central America, which means they fly approximately 2,000 miles or more to get here. If they're headed to the northern-most reaches of their range, add another 900 miles to that flight.
For a bird that weighs less than half an ounce, this is a remarkable feat, one appreciated by local birders who get to briefly experience these long-distance travelers as they stop to feed and rest at Presque Isle.
If you want your chance to see one up close, the Erie Bird Observatory bird banding station is open weekends (Friday and Saturday from 10 a.m. until 2 p.m. and Sunday from 10 a.m. until 4 p.m.) until the end of May, weather permitting. There, trained and permitted banders safely catch birds in very light nets and put numbered metal bands on their legs. It doesn't take long and the birds are handled very carefully. Educators are standing by to explain the banding procedure and why banding is important to conservation. Visitors can watch the banding take place and if they are lucky just might see a beautiful Black-throated Blue or another spring jewel that sets our hearts aflutter during their brief stopover here in Erie.
Mary Birdsong is the lead shorebird monitor for Erie Bird Observatory. Learn more at eriebirdobservatory.org. Mary can be reached at mbirdsong@eriereader.com
