Of a Feather: The friendly sugar eater

COURTESY MATT MACGILLVRAY
It is sleeting outside, turning to snow as the temperature drops below freezing. This is not a good time to be a bird in New Hampshire. It is not the greatest time to be a human being. Not surprisingly, my thoughts turn to warmer climes, namely my first trip outside the United States at the age of 13.

An unexpected windfall allowed my family to travel to the Bahamas in November 1973. We flew to Nassau and then got into a little propeller-driven plane and hopped over to the north end of Eleuthera. There we stayed in a bungalow facing the northern end of the Exuma Sound in a little hamlet called Current.

I was already a birdwatcher, and I was ready to see some exotic subtropical birds, but the scrubby forests of northern Eleuthera in early winter proved to be a disappointment. My brother and I saw a few species of fall warblers on their wintering grounds, which we knew were of scientific interest — the other end of migration and all that — but we were kind of hoping for something a little more colorful, a little more … foreign.

We got what we were looking for without leaving the patio of the bungalow. In the interest of thrift and also out of a natural curiosity, my mother did some food shopping in the hamlet grocery, and we ate out in the open air instead of going to the restaurant of The Current Club for every meal. As we sat, eating fruit and crackers — neither of which could we identify very specifically — several tiny black, white, and yellow birds appeared to feed on our scraps and crumbs. These I could identify quite specifically, as my Peterson guide included them on its final color plate, which was labeled “Some Florida Specialties.” It is about 100 miles between the southern coast of Florida and the westernmost islands of the Bahamas. Storms regularly sweep West Indian birds north and westward to our peninsular incursion into the Caribbean.

The bananaquit (Coereba flaveola) — pronounced “banana-keet” — is common throughout the West Indies, Mexico, Central America and northern South America. There are 41 acknowledged subspecies. The most obvious regional variation is in the color of the throat. In the Bahamas it is white, but elsewhere in the Caribbean it is often a sooty gray, and on the mainland from Mexico to South America it is usually a paler gray. One common feature in all the subspecies is the broad white stripe over the eye. A variable field mark is the white spot at the top of the outer primaries. Depending on the subspecies, when the birds are at rest it can vary from a distinct square to a vague streak to being entirely absent. As per my column of Jan. 22, this widespread species also has a dark morph, most often seen in the Lesser Antilles.

The bananaquit is also called the “honey creeper” as it is very fond of sweets. They eat primarily insects and spiders, but they are drawn to human landscapes by the plethora of discarded fruit, sweet beverages, and pastries that we tend to leave behind when we get up and walk away from a meal eaten outside. Bananaquits do not necessarily wait for you to leave. Birds that live in settled areas grow bold. If you think that house sparrows are aggressive as they hop around on the ground within feet of you, then you haven’t shared a tabletop with a group of hungry bananaquits.

Part of my excitement at seeing this tropical bird came from the fact that it did not resemble any North American bird that I knew. They move somewhat like wood warblers in that they are lightning quick and have a propensity for hanging upside down and creeping around at the very tips of tree branches. Their bills are slightly downward curving (decurved) like those of some wrens, but more robust. Peterson notes that they are about the size of a house wren. Many subspecies, including the Bahamian one, have a small red rim around the base of the beak. It looks like they have been eating jam and have neglected to wipe their mouths.

At the time I first saw the bananaquits, it was not really known to whom they were related. They had been tentatively classified as either warblers or sparrows or simply put in their own family. In the 21st century DNA studies showed that they are actually one of the tanagers (Thraupidae), most closely related to the subfamily that includes Darwin’s finches of the Galapagos Islands.

A 2008 molecular genetic study by Eva Bellemain, Eldredge Bermingham and Robert E. Ricklefs found that the species likely originated in the Greater Antilles and radiated from there throughout the Caribbean and also onto the adjacent mainland. This movement from the islands to the mainland was a revelation at the time, as the island biogeography hypothesis of E.O. Wilson and Robert MacArthur suggested that dispersal is usually in the opposite direction.

Bellemain and her co-authors also found evidence for multiple waves of colonization separated by periods of “quiescence.” This has created an immensely complex web of relatedness, some of it not terribly intuitive, such as the relative similarity between populations in the Bahamas and Quintana Roo (Yucatan) in Mexico. Their common source is Cuba, where the species is paradoxically not widespread today.

I have subsequently run into the bananaquit in my travels to Mexico, Belize, Barbados, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands. They are sort of the robin of the American tropics, in the sense that wherever you go, there they are. But instead of hopping around on the lawn, they are trying to steal your grapefruit before you are finished with it.

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].