Of a Feather: Little kings from the Old World

By BILL CHAISSON
By Bill Chaisson

In the gradually quieter mornings of the summer, I no longer hear some birds and have started to hear others I haven’t heard for a while. Although the black-throated blue warblers seem to have stopped singing, the chickadees and the blue jays are once more scolding their way through the forest. One morning this past week I took the dog up to Langenau Forest on the high ridge between Wilmot and Pleasant Lake in New London, looking for golden-crowned kinglets.

In late April the ruby-crowned kinglets had passed through with the early warblers. The ruby-crowns sing enthusiastically during migration, so I often have the false hope that perhaps they will stick around. But I still do not live far enough north. According to the Atlas of Breeding Birds in New Hampshire, I would have to live in northern Grafton or Coös County to have a decent chance of spending the summer among the ruby-crowned.

I do enjoy them for the brief intervals during which they are present. It takes a week or so for them to pass through and they are entertaining because they are so tiny, so loud, and so fidgety. At just over 4 inches long they are smaller and plumper than most warblers. They are a soft green above and an even softer gray-green below with dark gray wings that sport two wing bars, one large and bold and the other small and up near the wing coverts.

In the fall, several warbler species don this sort of green garb, but the kinglet can be recognized by its very large, dark eye, made to look even bigger by a prominent white eye ring. In addition, everything about a kinglet is rounder than a warbler or a vireo; they look chubby and short tailed with short thick necks and relatively large heads. This doesn’t make them sound very attractive, but in fact they are adorable.

While they somewhat resemble the New World warblers and vireos, kinglets are quite unrelated. They were often included in the Old World warblers or Sylviidae, which for a long time was a sort of garbage-can category. But in 2003 a study of transfer and ribosomal RNA sequences by Greg Spicer and Leslie Dunipace moved the kinglets not just out of the Sylviidae, but out of the superfamily Sylvoidea and into the Corvoidea (crows, jays and their allies) and gave them their own family, the Regulidae.

As long ago as 1915 W.D. Miller of the American Museum of Natural History suggested that the ruby-crown should be placed in Corthylio, a genus apart from the Regulus species. Kinglets differ from all other birds in having a single flat feather covering their nostrils. But the ruby-crown, according to Miller, has “several smaller and more bristly antrorse plumules. The latter is further distinguished by longer tarsi [legs], a larger and wider bill, absence of stripes on the head, and the uniform olive-green crown of the female.”

Ninety-six years after Miller proposed it, the American Ornithological Society resurrected the 19th century genus, and now the ruby-crowned kinglet is Corthylio calendula.

There are four wide-ranging species of kinglet (and two island endemics). In the Old World the goldcrest (Regulus regulus) is the conifer specialist and in the New World it is the golden-crowned kinglet (R. satrapa). Both have deep grooved pads on their feet to help them grip conifer twigs. They also have a long hind toe so they may cling while they feed hanging vertically. In contrast, the firecrest (R. ignicapilla) and the ruby-crowned are, respectively, the Old and New World generalists. They have smoother feet and shorter hind toes, as they more often feed on the wing.

When I went looking for the golden-crowned kinglets early this week, I did not find them. Through May and June, I could reliably hear them singing high up in the branches in a grove of hemlocks and white pines just behind the crest of the ridge. Since the first week of July, however, they have been silent. I never got a good look at them because they remained up in the crowns and flitted about constantly, issuing their (per Sibley) see see see sisi tititichichichi. They also have a zee-zee-zee call that resembles the first part of their song. Now that they aren’t making any sound at all, they might as well be invisible.

According to The Birds of New Hampshire, the golden-crowns breed down through the western highlands of the state above 1,000 feet. Indeed, my local kinglets are at ~1,400 feet on the western shoulder of Philbrick Hill. And while the golden-crowns breed further south than the ruby-crowns, they are also much more inclined to linger here in the winter. They are regularly seen at Christmas Bird Counts, but then less often later in the winter, which is likely caused by fewer people looking for them. They don’t tend to visit feeders.

As ruby-crowns pass through in the spring, they sing their loud song. It begins with a sii si sisisi, similar to the golden-crown, but it then shifts to lower pitched, rounder tones Sibley renders as berr berr berr pudi pudi see. When their blood is up, they abruptly lift that startling red shock of feathers on top of their heads. In the fall they do not sing, but instead utter their scornful jit call, repeatedly when they are aggravated.

The golden-crowns up at Langenau may still be feeding fledglings and so are feeling necessarily furtive right now. Grayer and smaller than the ruby-crowns, with black-and-white racing stripes across their faces and golden-orange crowns, they are a delight to encounter when they deign to descend from their lofty, coniferous heights.

Bill Chaisson has been a birdwatcher from the age of 10. He is a former managing editor of the Eagle Times and now lives and works in the town of Wilmot. Contact him at [email protected].