THIS IS THE MONTH FOR WARBLERS

Prothonotary Warbler

Photo courtesy of Sharon Milligan

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It is almost time for the Prothonotary Warbler --- yellower than yellow, brighter than bright. It visits its luminescent charms upon us in early March. People will be calling; they always do, to inquire about this 5-inch bird whose color is guaranteed to test one's power of description. It is my favorite among warblers. 

    I first wrote about the Prothonotary Warbler 25 years ago (1970s). The article appeared in this newspaper, then a national magazine, and eventually became part of a bird anthology.The first spring migrant that I ever identified was a Prothonotary Warbler. I found him in a roadside ditch. He was a hot citron spark among decaying leaves, a burst of brilliance above still water. 

    I let the world go by while I watched the golden bird turn the odorous ditch into an enchanted place. He was too busy to know or care that I stood above that little universe of his. He threaded his tiny body through a lacework of leaves and inspected the dank recesses of the mudbank. He scrambled up and down, in and out, between the new-green stalks of elephant ears; he disappeared beneath a fallen willow branch and returned to me atop an ancient cypress stump; he probed, scrutinized, as if to him had fallen the task of sleuthing out all that lived and grew or had ever lived and grown in that insignificant place. 

    I returned on several mornings to watch him. He was a magical bird. He made a bird watcher out of me. He made me a lover of swamps and a believer in mystical ditches. He became symbolic of spring, like the lilacs and forsythia of my New England growing-up; like the azaleas and wisteria of March in the South. Eventually he sang for me in that assertive, no-frills series of notes that breathes life into the swamps and river bottoms and insignificant ditches of eastern North America. 

    Each year, when March begins, I wait for him to signal the start of the great northward pilgrimage. No matter that the Louisiana Waterthrush traditionally arrives earlier, or that Northern Parulas are already making hammocks in the Spanish moss. I must wait for the first prothonotary, the torchbearer of spring, and I have great expectations. 

    One year, the first prothonotary was late. I searched the ditches and swamps for a glimpse of his burning yellow plumage, and listened for the ring of his song, but it was March 12 before I found him. 

    He lay lifeless on a dewy woodland floor, smaller in death than he looked in life. His delicate body was still warm, every feather still smoothly in place, as if at any moment life would return, and all would be well. 

    I cupped him in the palms of my hands and realized that he weighed less than a camellia blossom. He was longer, tip of bill to tip of tail, than my ring finger. I knew he was a male by the brightness of his head and breast --- incandescent, even on a fog-filled morning. 

    Perhaps he was a bird of the year --- one who had never really lived at all. Or maybe he had lived beyond his prime; for so small a bird, that prime might have been three or four years of great good luck. 

    He would have spent the first days of his life in an insistent clamor for food --- spiders, insects, and small, plump, green caterpillars --- in a nest of moss tucked discreetly into an old chickadee hole or in a natural cavity in a fallen limb. Between the warmth of that nest and the cool forest floor of the Coast, he would have traveled far. 

    He had survived the ordeal of the fledgling, so he must have been fit. And for a time, at least, favored by nature. By mid-October of the previous year, he had left his summer home behind to join other warblers in the southward migration. 

    Strong wings and favorable weather would have carried him across the Gulf of Mexico, to the Yucatan Peninsula, an incredible over-water journey of more than 500 miles. Perhaps he had gone farther, to the mangroves of Sevillano or the fresh swamps of Cienega in Columbia to spend the winter in habitat akin to that in which he fledged. 

    Sometime during that February, he felt a restless stirring in his heart, so persistent that he moved up from the swamp forest, away from the mangroves, responding to an ancient instinct that beckons all birds back to ancestral breeding grounds. 

    It was preordained that he should attempt a long exhausting flight back to the place of his beginning, where he would battle his rivals, win his mate, and, with inbred solicitude, feed her on the nest and bring insects to the young. Until the cycle was complete. 

    Before that long flight, he ate and grew stronger, building up reserves of energy, enough to sustain him for more than thirty hours of day and night flying. He made it to the shores of Waveland and fell to earth just as safe haven was reached. 

    The hows and whys escaped me, then and now. I scooped a little hollow in the earth, lined it with pine needles and Spanish moss, and laid spring's first prothonotary in its grave. 

This article appeared in the Sun Herald in March, 2001