Yes, this is a birding column, and I am having a little fun here. Readers who have sleuthed through that first paragraph while scratching their heads may have picked up thinly veiled geographical and environmental allusions which hint this column is all about one of North America’s most beautiful, and rarest, birds. Just place the word “jack” in front of the pines, capitalize them both, and you’ll see the light. This is about our recent trip to northern Lower Michigan to finally see, and photograph well, Kirtland’s Warbler.
When Deva and I saw our first Kirtland’s, a male, it was on a Michigan Department of Natural Resources (DNR) tour in 1990, nearly twenty years after the warbler’s species numbers had plummeted to an all time low of 201 singing males and the bird had been one of the first to be listed on the Endangered Species Act. The recovery partnership between DNR and U.S. Fish & Game slowly began to bear results shortly after that, and we chanced upon a migrating female on the Crane Creek State Park boardwalk in Ohio in the spring of 2005. That’s two sightings and no photographs over 50 years of birding so, yes, we were finally on our Kirtland’s mission.
Meticulous research indicated DNR was still running tours through the “perpetually managed” Jack Pine habitat, but my best chances for high quality photography would be to simply walk a lot of dirt roads through recovery areas, where wandering off road into the forest is strictly forbidden, and just listen for males singing on territories. Driving slowly down a road through the pines our first morning, we heard a male’s Kirtland’s clear, persistent, seven note call out the car’s open window. We stopped and got out, disbelieving we had found this intersection of intention and luck so quickly.
The bird sounded to be about head high, working its way toward the road edge, and within minutes we saw movement through the pines, tree to tree, limb to ground, foraging in leaves beside a downed log, then a shadow of movement upward. Suddenly he landed directly in front of us at eye level, only yards away. And sang! We’d heard Kirtland’s are not shy. “Confiding” is the quaint birding term for this trait. Indeed!
The next morning we were there at dawn, soon joined by a DNR tour group whose Michigan Audubon leader confirmed we had by chance stumbled onto an area where researchers had pinpointed an active nest. And there was another known location within a quarter mile down the road! Not much walking, then, but a lot of waiting as the nest itself was impossible to spot in the ground debris twenty yards off the road through the limbs and needles of the fifteen foot high stand of pines that had grown up on the footprint of a 2010 fire.
Most mornings “hurry up and wait” was our strategy for photographing as the males of each pair were bringing food to the females sitting on eggs. Unfortunately for reasons unknown to us or the researchers, the pair at the second nest soon abandoned their territory, but Katy and Kirt carried on undisturbed, he bringing all manner of caterpillars and insects to her at the nest, typically two or three times in an hour, then disappearing for up to a couple hours. Invariably his return was heralded by his song to let her, and us, know he was in the area and had something to deliver, and our routine quickly became napping in the car until we heard him coming.
During our visit we were able to corroborate much of what the literature has to offer about Kirtland’s, most importantly that at last census about 2,250 pairs were counted, some now in central Wisconsin, Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, and Ontario. Recovery has progressed far enough beyond original projections that DNR is no longer trapping Brown-headed Cowbirds whose parasitism of Kirtland’s’ nests was one of the three major reasons for their decline, the others being forest fragmentation and fire suppression.
Katy and Kirt’s menu was mostly caterpillars and moths, brought by him as she incubated, but on one occasion he came in with a hover fly. Twice we saw Katy leave the nest briefly, both when Kirt had returned to the area though male Kirtland’s are not known to share in incubation. Once she appeared to have a water droplet at the end of her beak. Once we watched her sit and preen on a low branch, so there might have been a hidden rain pool under a nearby log, another plus for their new homestead.
With global warming, water in the Bahamas where the species clusters on their wintering grounds has become an issue too. Rainfall, which dictates the availability of food there is decreasing, and it is known that birds that linger longer to fatten up for migration are less successful nesters in Michigan. A researcher to whom we later spoke indicated this nest was known to have five eggs, and after the hatch Katy and Kirt would be netted and geotagged to help solve a missing piece of the Kirtland’s puzzle—what kind of habitat exists on their migration path. We wished them all the best, hopeful that management of their Jack Pines will provide sightings for this rare and beautiful species for future generations of ours.
