Warbler wrapup, 2025

2025 was a terrible year for warblers, at least in my yard.  But it was a great year for house sparrows (and house finches, probably for the same reason).  Is there a linkage?  Maybe, but first the paltry count:

Magnolia warbler: 4, at widely spaced intervals (May 1 to May 24)
Common yellowthroat:  4
American redstart:  2
Chestnut-sided warbler: 2 (or one over two days)
Black-throated blue: 1
Ovenbird:  1

I did spend a fair amount of time in the yard, even if I was away a few days in the middle of the month. I think this was actually the worst year ever, since I began paying attention about ten years ago.

So why?  In the past, I've waffled on the question of whether the number of house sparrows has any correlation.  but I've come to believe again that it has.  Bugs and caterpillars are not an endless resource in the neighborhood, and if I have a troupe of house sparrows camped out in my walnut tree day after day, visibly eating all the bugs and caterpillars there -- well, you can do the math.

I also find it telling that last year I had both house wrens and chickadees nesting in my yard. and this year I had neither.  The wren showed up at the beginning of May, sang for a week, and then decamped. And I didn't see that many other migrants, either -- no vireos, no hummingbirds, only a few kinglets, a flycatcher or two.

I have a mind to put up a screech owl box over the winter.  

The predators among us

Here's a new one on me:  a blue jay eating a house sparrow, and with some relish.  If this sparrow was a fledgling, it was pretty well grown.  I didn't see how this started, but my impression is the sparrow was predated elsewhere -- or found dead, I suppose -- and brought into this tree.  The jay ate half of it before inadvertently dropping it, at which point I went to look at it.  But when I retreated, the jay came back to collect the rest of the carcass, and flew off to eat it elsewhere.  That reads as a pretty substantial meal to me.

But now I'm fearing that the chickadee nestlings currently being fed in their box are going to have a rough go of it.

 

Open House

 

I've been a landlord for a long time, and I'm very familiar with the drill every time I show an open unit:  will the prospective tenants take it, or not?  Same goes for the birdhouses I put up.  Carolina wrens have been around my yard for a few weeks, and they've visited this birdhouse inside and out, but... they've yet to make up their minds, I think.

I've had two of these birdhouses up since the previous winter, and they've never been occupied.  They're sized for house wrens, but I don't know of anybody in Somerville who has a house wren.  I've seen exactly one in all my years here, migrating through, by all appearances.  Carolina wren has become much more of a city bird in recent years.  I hear them with some frequency, particularly in Cambridge.  And because they're here year round, they can get a jump on nesting. and grab the best nesting spots before the house wrens come through.

Unless, of course, they lose out to the chickadees...

But actually, I have an older nesting box, made out of a section of tree trunk, that I think the chickadees prefer.  So we'll just have to see, and probably will see, soon.  The cardinals at least are very busy collecting sticks.

 

Warbler wrapup, 2023

 

In the past, I've fretted about my year's warbler numbers going up and down, but I think I've finally realized that one observer, in one small yard in Somerville, is just way too small a lens.  That said, my numbers were decent this year -- 26 individuals, across nine species.  And I was even away for a critical window, from the 6th to the 9th of May (I was in Cape May, New Jersey, where, ironically enough, I saw almost no warblers, despite some diligent looking).

Magnolia was the winner this year, with six individuals, across a range of days.  Common yellowthroat was just behind, with five, then four black-and-whites, and four ovenbirds.  Those patterns have been pretty typical over the years.  But unusually this year, I had three new species for Somerville:  Canada, Tennessee, and bay-breasted.  Unfortunately, I only got pictures of the Tennessee, and they were of a quality I would describe as sub-masterpiece:

These sightings were all from my yard, since I scarcely ventured out into Somerville to look for warblers elsewhere.  And beyond warblers, there wasn't much -- more hummingbirds than usual, a few flycatchers, and that was that.  The last flycatcher showed up on June 8th, which seemed unusually late.  Somebody forgot to make themselves a calendar alert, I guess.

Neither Moscow nor mallard

 

Weird stuff fetches up by the Mystic.  I've seen, over the years, a chicken, a greylag goose,  and now today, the latest in feral waterfowl, a Muscovy duck.  This is not a bird that's particularly on my radar, and so I would know nothing about it if it weren't for Wikipedia.  So, for the record, this creature is a duck native to the Americas south of the Rio Grande, known to scientists as Cairina moschata, and known in the barnyard as Mucovy duck, or Barbary duck -- because, of course, it has nothing to do with either Moscow or the Barbary Coast.  It has long been domesticated, and like all domesticated fowl, comes in a wide variety of formats.

Now, you can say it's not a Massachusetts species, and still less a Somerville species, but I don't care -- it's going on my list.

The Ovenbird

 

Ovenbirds constitute a distinct season in my yard -- about ten days after the first week of May.  There's a part of my yard that's irresistibly attractive to them, a shady lane (of blacktop, this being Somerville), with a cedar fence on one side and a thick shrubbery on the other.  I doubt there's another person in Somerville who boasts a yard so magnetic to ovenbirds.  It's a small distinction, but I'm pleased with it, out of affection for the ovenbird.

Ovenbird was not, by the way, the only monotypic warbler in my yard today. Shame on you if you can't think of the other one.

Warbler wrapup, Spring 2020

I made a discovery this spring: the more time I spend in my yard, the more warblers I see.

In years past, I've worried about declining warbler numbers, at least as they manifest locally.  I've blamed house sparrows, and while it's true that sparrows compete with warblers for food, and on occasion harass them, I've come to doubt that there's a tight linkage between the number of sparrows and the number of warblers that pass through.  There are a ton of other factors that affect how many warblers I see, starting with level of effort, of course, but including such things as weather, overall population numbers, and even local vegetation patterns (for example, this last year I lost my apple tree, which was a bit of a bird magnet).

Just taking what I saw in and from my yard, I counted the following:

Black and white, 10
Black-throated blue, 2
Cape May, 2
Magnolia, 2
Ovenbird, 6
Northern parula, 1
American redstart, 3
Wilson's, 1
Yellow, 3
Common yellowthroat, 9
Yellow-rumped, 1

There are a few others I was unable to identify, or only heard singing, and some of these birds may have been continuing birds that got counted twice, but in general, I feel like this was a pretty representative year:  11 species, across five genera.  Ovenbird was the curtain-raiser, on May 3, and American redstart brought the season to a close on June 1 -- rather later than usual.

I also spent some time at the Mystic and Alewife Brook, and saw some species there that I didn't see in my yard:  chestnut-sided, prairie, and Blackburnian.

All taken in all, I saw the species I expected to see, with a few exceptions:  blackpoll, palm, and pine.  And I even added a new one for my Somerville list, in Blackburnian warbler.