Time to celebrate Kirtland's warbler
You have to admire one who summers four months in Michigan, winters eight months in the Bahamas, and makes the trip without flying on a commercial airline or doing a fly-and-drive combo.
Then there’s all that hoopla about making one’s surroundings just right, no matter that it might inconvenience others. And atop it all, celebrations in that part-time summer homeland.
All those and more are attributes of the Kirtland’s warbler, a tiny songbird the DNR calls one of the rarest members of the wood warbler family, and in whose honor special events are about to get underway.
Many Michiganders have at least a passing familiarity with the natural history of the warbler.
Nearly all of its nests are in northern Lower Michigan, while a few are in the Upper Peninsula and parts of Wisconsin and Ontario.
Those nests are built on the ground in young stands of jack pines, a scruffy-looking tree that grows only when and where fire has opened the cones of its parents. Effective fire suppression made life so tough for the warbler that in 1974 and again in 1987, only a few hundred were thought to exist.
Prescribed burns created habitat. So did wildfire. (And managed fire could become wild: In 1980, a managed burn got out of control and became the Mack Lake fire, creating thousands of acres of habitat but destroying homes and cottages, and taking a U.S. Forest Service technician’s life.)
Biologists also pointed their fingers at brown-headed cowbirds, which placed and abandoned eggs in warblers’ nests; earlier-hatching baby cowbirds got the survival jump on warbler young. Cowbird trapping and execution followed.
Between the two efforts, Kirtland’s warbler numbers rebounded; recent annual surveys yielded population estimates upward of 4,700; they were officially declared “recovered.”
Still, who has ever seen a Kirtland’s warbler? Not me. Even those who count them, do it not by the birds they see, but by listening for the male’s song, audible a quarter-mile away. They double the count, assuming a female for each courting-minded male.
If you saw one, you’d note the male’s bright yellow breast, its bluish streaked back, it dark face mask and bobbing tail. The female’s plumage is duller, no face mask. Both are less than six inches long.
Small bird, but big celebrations.
Friday, from 6:30 to 9 p.m., the Kirtland’s Warbler Alliance will host the Kirtland’s Warbler Home Opener at the Ralph A. MacMullan Conference Center in Roscommon. It will include a silent auction, and a presentation on Kirtland’s warbler migration routes by Dr. Nathan Cooper of the Smithsonian Institution.
Saturday brings the Kirtland’s Warbler Festival, 7 a.m. to 5 p.m., in Roscommon, with warbler tours, wildlife presentations and a kayak trip.
(Info on either Roscommon event in at Huronpine.org/festival)
Kirtland’s warbler tours will be led by the Michigan Audubon Society from Hartwick Pines State Park from May 15 through July 4 (info at www.michiganaudubon.org); by the U.S. Forest Service from Mio May 15-31 (info by email from MioKWTours@fs.fed.us); and from Camp Inn Lodge at Oscoda June 3 – July 3 (info at www.CampInnLodge.com).
They’re all great ways to celebrate the short Michigan summer we share with this distinctive, if seldom seen, small bird.
Email Midland freelance outdoors writer Steve Griffin at firstname.lastname@example.org