Of a Feather: An autumnal mood

By BILL CHAISSON
This is a time of year when I am not sure who is a lingering resident and who is just passing through. I keep thinking our local hummingbirds have departed and then I see another one. The most recent was a female ruby-throated outside of the lushly planted library in Keene. She was going from one red Salvia flower to the next and then decided to perch in a shrub where I got a good look at her.

Similarly, I keep thinking that our neighborhood broad-winged hawks have gone south. The most recent total from the Pack Monadnock group on the NH Bird Forum is from Thursday, Sept. 23, and almost 6,000 broad-wings have flown by. This is compared to the next most abundant migrant, the sharp-shinned hawk, of which a mere 368 have been counted. The turkey vultures have not yet begun to move south; they have counted none at Pack Monadnock, and I still see plenty around.

Just two days ago on Thursday, while sitting on our front porch, I heard the call of the broad-wing. I didn’t spot it, but we did see a blue jay sitting in a nearby fir tree. I wouldn’t put it past a blue jay to have mastered the cry of a broad-winged hawk.

I have been seeing flocks of migrants as I drive through town and noticed they seem to favor open areas with hedgerows, but that could be simply where I most easily see them. Most of the passerine birds are night migrants, so the best time to see them is early in the morning after they have set down. They then feed ravenously in order to collect calories for the next leg of their journey south.

I was standing in my own kitchen nursing a cup of coffee and complaining to my Better Half that migrants didn’t seem to see fit to settle in our hedgerow-lined field, when I suddenly noticed that the shrubs along the headwaters of Cassey Brook were filled with frantically feeding birds.

I grabbed my binoculars and aimed them at the trees along the brook and immediately spotted a ruby-crowned kinglet. With all the “confusing fall warblers” about I gave it a second look, but the big-headedness and enormous eye, accentuated by a complete white eye ring, differentiates it from slimmer, greenish warblers with wing bars. However, it also resembles the next bird I saw: the blue-headed vireo. Unlike the ruby-crowned kinglet, which I only see in migration here in central New Hampshire, the vireo is a local breeder.

This one, however, was definitely in a mixed flock of migrants, and migrants have a different air about them than resident birds. Their feeding is more business-like and focused. Birds on their own territory will stop to sing, and they also seem to be looking for the best leaf-eating larvae to eat. Migrants, on the other hand, give me the impression that they are eating everything in sight.

The kinglet and the vireo were sharing the trees with some yellow-rumped warblers who, characteristically, were also making their way down into the shrubs along the brook. Unlike the other migrants present that morning, most of whom are headed for at least the southeastern U.S., if not across the Caribbean to South America, the yellow-rumped warblers may winter as far north as southern New England. I have included them in a Christmas Bird Count on Martha’s Vineyard. Yellow-rumped warblers are capable of switching to a vegetable diet in the winter, while most other warblers follow their insect supply southward.

As I crossed the bridge into the field, I passed a catbird foraging in the alder and sumac clump. This may have been our local bird, which I see only irregularly through the warmer months. Catbirds love thickets and there is an alder-red maple swamp across the road that drains down to Kimpton Brook, where I suspect the resident catbird spends a lot of the warmer months. One of them (the sexes are identical) occasionally strays across the road into the Cassey Brook drainage to forage. If it was the male, it sang only rarely, which suggested to me that it was at the periphery of its territory and not very committed to defense. More often it emitted its querulous mewing call at the sight of the dog or me.

We had a pair of catbirds in the backyard when we lived on the Lane River in Sutton. They stuck around until late October in 2020, perhaps sustained by the abundant berries on the honeysuckles there. Like the yellow-rumped warblers, they readily become vegetarians in the fall. Consequently, they may also winter as far north as the coast of Connecticut and Rhode Island, but most depart for the Gulf Coast, Caribbean and South America. Those that winter along the Yucatan coast in Mexico encounter the black catbird, their closest relative.

A house wren raised a brood in the general vicinity of the burn pile that has been growing through the summer next to the track through the field. After weeks of being scolded by at least four wrens every time I walked past this pile with or without the dog, they now seem to have gone, unlike their Carolina wren cousin, who doesn’t know better.

On the ground around the burn pile there were several sparrows unfamiliar to me. They had streaked chests and sides with a blurred pin spot. The heads were also complexly streaked, broad on the throat and cheeks and reddish-brown on the head with a gray line down the center. The buffiness trailing down from the small bill and along the sides marked them as Lincoln’s sparrows, another boreal bird passing through.

I feel a bit like a bus station attendant, someone who meets a lot of different and interesting people, but only briefly, before they carry on with their journeys. And this autumn’s journey has weeks more to go.

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].