My fascination with this year's spring warbler migration is turning into a contest: just how many species can I spot? The number reached five this past weekend after I encountered a Wilson's and a black-throated gray, both in Phoenix. They added to the painted redstart, Lucy's warbler, and common yellowthroat I had identified over the two previous weeks.
Of course factoring in the warblers that spend the winter in the Phoenix area, like the yellow-rumped and the orange-crowned, the number is even higher. As a result, the local number of the small, colorful songbirds rises to seven.
My preoccupation with the warblers really started in February, on Cozumel in Mexico, where I spotted two visiting species, the American redstart and the pine warbler. Unfortunately these birds mostly don't migrate to the far western United States, preferring the east for their summer breeding seasons. Nonetheless, adding them, this year's warbler-spotting number reaches nine!
The count is bound to increase further as I hit the birding trail in the coming days, scanning the palo verde, ironwood, and mesquite trees for calls different from the gentle peeps of the omnipresent verdins. A yellow, a black-and-white, a Townsend's, a red-faced, a MacGillivray's, or a hermit's warbler, all previously sighted in the state, might just be waiting to join my list.
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| A black-throated gray warbler at the Desert Botanical Garden. It was my first sighting of the species in the Phoenix area. |
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| A male Wilson's warbler in my Phoenix neighborhood. |
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