A few weekends ago on a Saturday taken up by leaf-raking and backyard soccer with my three-year old, I heard the sweet tinkling calls of my first American Tree Sparrows of the fall. Later, I tracked them down with my binoculars in hand and got to view their rusty caps and uniquely bicolored bills�black on top and yellow on the bottom. These are birds from the northern edge of the Boreal and are clear indicators that winter is almost here where I live in central Maine.
About the same time, I read a post on a Caribbean birds listserve from a Kevel who was noting the arrival of dozens of unidentified warblers in and around his backyard on the island of St. Thomas in the U.S. Virgin Islands. Kevel had sent out a query because he wasn't sure of the identities of these somewhat nondescript greenish backed, white-breasted warblers with yellow feet that swarmed over the island. Kevel's photos clinched the identification�Blackpoll Warblers. One of the most famous of Boreal birds (82% of the population breeds in the Boreal), Blackpoll Warbler undertake a migration that is nearly unfathomable. Taking off from the Canadian Maritimes and New England, many of the birds head straight out to sea towards Africa. After days of flying with no rest, they are blown westerly by the prevailing winds from Africa so that they (hopefully) make landfall in South America where they will spend the winter. Of course things don't always go perfectly and winds and hurricanes can blow the migrants off course. Hence Kevel's observation of Blackpoll Warblers in the northern Caribbean a few weeks ago.
Up in Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, where Blackpoll Warblers raise their young, a different species that signals winter has begun arriving. Jason, my friend from Ducks Unlimited who showed our group around on my August visit to the Mackenzie Valley, sent an email last week to report that the first Rock Ptarmigan had arrived in town. Most birders think of ptarmigan as non-migratory birds. But in both Rock and Willow Ptarmigan, birds from certain regions undergo extensive migrations over hundreds of miles, sometimes in flocks numbering in the thousands. There are even vagrant records of one or both species in such far-flung places as North Dakota, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Maine and even Sable Island, Nova Scotia, more than 100 miles from the mainland. Jason promised to send a photo of a flock of ptarmigan in his Yellowknife yard for me to share with you. I should probably forward Kevel�s photos of the Blackpoll Warblers from the Virgin Islands to him. The connections these birds make between America�s ecosystems are amazing. There are about two BILLION birds from the Boreal that winter in Central and South America and the Caribbean. Another BILLION Boreal birds winter in the U.S. If any of you have any observations on the arrival of Boreal birds in your area, please feel free to add a comment below.
All of these amazing connections will be officially celebrated next spring in thousands of events across the Americas. That�s because the theme for next spring�s International Migratory Bird Day (IMBD) is the Boreal Forest: Bird Nursery of the North. Hope some of you may decide to either get involved in an existing IMBD event or start a new one as a way to help out with Boreal bird conservation.
Jeff Wells
