I drank a cup of cocoa and thought of Cape May Warblers. A few days ago Evan and I came in from an hour of winter-sledding in the backyard to the welcome discovery that Mom had mugs of sweet, hot chocolate waiting for us to warm our wind-reddened cheeks. Maybe it was the slow return to life of my cold-addled brain or the exhaustion from trying to keep up with a four-year-old, but as I sipped my cocoa I found myself thinking, not only of Cape May Warblers but of Hispaniolan Lizard Cuckoos and Golden Swallows and Antillean Piculets. And remembering the smells of the Dominican Republic--muddy mountain roads and hot salt lagoons and charcoal cooking fires burning.

Last August when I was with a group of birding authors in Yellowknife, we took a walk around Niven Lake. There, among a small flock of migrating warblers in the spruces, Pete Dunne picked out a single Cape May Warbler. Yellowknife is actually nearing the northern edge of the Cape May Warbler breeding range and this was the only one of that species that we saw though there were lots of Yellow Warblers, Northern Waterthrushes, Palm Warblers, and Orange-crowned Warblers.

Now, in January, Yellowknife is not a home for warblers of any sort. It's a place for Willow Ptarmigan and Common Ravens and Gray Jays but only a few other species. "Few" in this case being defined as 9-15 species—the number of species found on the Yellowknife Christmas Bird Count over the past ten years.

Beginning in August when we were Yellowknife, millions of Cape May Warblers began spilling south from their Boreal Canada breeding range to give fall birders across the eastern U.S. something to scan for among those flocks of what Peterson described as the "confusing fall warblers". A few vagrant Cape Mays even popped up in Nevada and California this fall as they do annually we now know from birders carefully checking desert oases where off-track migrants often congregate.

But by January the Cape May Warbler might be better called the Caribbean Warbler or the Greater Antilles Warbler. That's because most of their population of 3-6 million becomes one of the most abundant and widespread components of the winter avian communities of Cuba and Hispaniola.

A number of years back I brought a group of Auduboners from New York State on a visit to the Dominican Republic side of the island of Hispaniola. We traveled from the bustling capital city of Santo Domingo, over to the "inland sea" of Lago Enriquillo and up into the Sierra de Bahoruco mountains in the southwest corner tucked up against the Haitian border. Everywhere we went, from the hot, dry thorn scrub to the shade-grown coffee and cacao plantations in the foothills to the cool, open Caribbean pines at the highest elevations and even in the courtyards of cities and towns, we found Cape May Warblers.

In the winter, these birds we northerners think of as insect-eating, conifer-inhabiting specialists do something completely different. In the Caribbean they feed on nectar from flowers on palm trees and other sources! You have to wonder what sort of key ecological role that Cape May Warblers, because of their great abundance, must play as pollinators (and other unknown ways) in Caribbean ecosystems. And how much do the special birds of Hispaniola--the reptilian Hispaniolan Lizard Cuckoos, the threatened Golden Swallows, the tiny nuthatch-like Antillean Piculets, and dozens of other species found nowhere else—owe to the Cape May Warblers of the Boreal for helping to maintain the delicate balance of plants and animals in their fragile and declining island home?

The hot cocoa that Evan and I were enjoying this fine winter weekend in Maine was grown in an organic, shade-grown cacao plantation in the Dominican Republic. The recycled paper towel that I used to clean up Evan's drips represented a Boreal tree that could still hold a warbler nest next summer.

We are all connected.

Cape May Warblers and cocoa, Yellowknife in August, Santo Domingo in January, and us in our kitchen in Maine. It means that what we do really does matter, that we can make a difference.

How are you connected?