The Secret Life of the Kirtland’s Warbler

Page 4

It happened so fast that I didn’t even have time to raise my binoculars, much less look through them. I saw blue-gray above and yellow below but wondered whether I had seen a yellow-throated warbler or some other species, not a Kirtland’s.

I peered into the void into which the bird vanished, hoping it might reappear. As I waited, I thought of the naturalist Charles Johnson Maynard, who collected 38 Kirtland’s warblers between 1884 and 1915, many of them right here on Eleuthera. He referred to the wintering warbler as a “shy bird of solitary habits.”

“Never in any case did I find two together,” he wrote. “The only note that they uttered was a harsh chirp, with which they greeted me when alarmed at my approach. When one was not secured at first sight, it generally retreated into the bushes and silently disappeared.”

My bird had been alone, and it had uttered a harsh chirp and disappeared. Scanning the ground and low branches, I wondered if the fly-by would be all I would get to see.

But then the bird popped back out of the scrub, surmounted a pile of rocks and stood in plain view. I quickly raised my binoculars and focused. I saw gray and black wings, a lemon-yellow throat, breast and belly, and thin black streaks on the chest and flanks, as well as white crescents above and below each eye. It was a Kirtland’s warbler all right.

Four bands were on its legs: One was metal. Two were faded plastic. The fourth was bright orange. And I could see a thin black antenna dangling beyond its tail. It was PXGO, and it was anything but shy.

Now the equivalent of an elder statesman among the warblers on Eleuthera, PXGO was nearing the end of at least its 10th winter in the Bahamas. And the last thing it wanted to hear, apparently, was another Kirtland’s warbler. It didn’t look out of the ordinary. It acted the way you might expect a chipper to act. Yet I knew it was one of the most important Kirtland’s warblers ever, for in the last three winters it had helped us start filling in the life story of an endangered species.

I put down my binoculars and noticed that the bird and I were looking at each other. That realization made me catch my breath.

How many times, I wondered, had I and others pondered the Kirtland’s winter whereabouts and habits? And here I was, eye to eye with a banded, radio-tagged warbler. On Eleuthera. In March.

Currie, Ewert and Wunderle insist that many questions remain to be answered, not the least of which is whether the habitat the warbler is using is fated to endure or change, either naturally or by bulldozer; whether information gathered on Eleuthera can be used to locate more warblers on other islands; whether rainfall in the Bahamas determines how many singing warblers are counted in Michigan; and, perhaps most important, whether birds in general and one warbler in particular might be sufficient to alter how tourists, and the Bahamians themselves, think of this island paradise.

Discerning the answers to such questions will no doubt require the contributions of every one of the young scientists the project is nurturing, as well as time. But after a century and a half of waiting, we members of the Kirtland’s warbler fan club are nothing if not hopeful.

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