Nature’s Warp & Weft: Migrating Birds Connect Distant Regions
- Julie Reiff
- Apr 15
- 4 min read
By James Reddoch
“Old Sam, Peabody, Peabody.” I could hear the clear, strong whistle of white-throated sparrows as we drove up the long driveway to my sister’s house in eastern Mississippi. This bird winters from southern New England down through the Deep South. I’ve always loved seeing and hearing them in the winter and early spring when I visit my family. I imagine that some of these birds might be among those I will hear in a few weeks on hikes through the spruce forests of the Mahoosuc Region, their preferred nesting habitat.
“Have you seen your prothonotary warbler pair yet?” I asked my sister.
“No,” she bemoaned, “I’m afraid they won’t nest here this year!” Over the past seven years she had shared photos of these lemon-yellow birds nesting annually in a decorative bird box in her garden.
“It’s still early,” I said, hoping that the trend wouldn’t be broken.
As we pulled into her carport, I saw a flash of bright yellow. There, much to our delight, was a male prothonotary perched at the entrance to the bird box. It poked its head into the nesting chamber then turned back to us as we sat spellbound.
This bird had just arrived overnight. My sister’s yard was the end of a trip that had started over 2,000 miles away in Colombia, the region in South America that is the winter host to 90% of its entire population.
“Imagine that - from Colombia, South America to Columbus, Mississippi,” I whispered as it flitted off through the garden.
In recent months, I had been thinking about how tiny birds like white-throated sparrows and prothonotary warblers stitch together vastly different regions to form an intricate and delicate fabric of biodiversity.
Later, as I walked around her 29-acre property, I checked BirdCast. It showed a heavy volume of birds had migrated over her county the previous night. BirdCast uses ground-based radar to detect migrating birds, then pairs what it sees with eBird data to make educated guesses about what species are in that migrating cloud. Prothonotary warblers were near the top of the list.
From Colombia to Mississippi to Maine, these tiny travelers stitch together a living tapestry that binds distant places into one shared world.
In one tree I counted five northern parulas, another species predicted by BirdCast. My sister’s yard served as a stopover where they could rest and refuel before continuing up the eastern seaboard. By early May parulas will arrive in the woods surrounding my yard in Albany Township, Maine – prime nesting habitat for this species, which winters in the Caribbean and Yucatan.
I recorded 29 species in her yard that day. In my mind, the nighttime flights of each of those birds formed threads that stitch together Colombia to Mississippi and Mississippi to Maine.
Two nights later, flying back to New England, I was staring out the window mesmerized by the lights on the ground below. Was this the view that migrating parulas were seeing as well?
The man in the seat next to me had left Hokkaido, Japan, 20 hours earlier. He had been studying aquaculture and was bringing what he had learned back to his oyster farm in Yarmouth, Maine. He talked about the ecosystem that forms between oysters and the eelgrass beds in sheltered bays along Maine’s coast - bays that are winter harbors for seabirds like common loons, which were, no doubt, restlessly awaiting ice-out on ponds across Maine and New Hampshire.
More birds, more threads that stitch together the vast and vital tapestry that links the Mahoosuc Region to other regions across the world.
Photo Credits:
Prothonotary Warbler Photo copyright by Joy Reddoch
White-Throated Sparrow by Cephas. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported, 2.5 Generic, 2.0 Generic and 1.0 Generic license.
Northern Parula by Andrew Weitzel. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.
Sources:
Falls, J. B. and J. G. Kopachena (2020). White-throated Sparrow (Zonotrichia albicollis), version 1.0. In Birds of the World (A. F. Poole, Editor). Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Ithaca, NY, USA. https://doi.org/10.2173/bow.whtspa.01
Petit, L. J. (2020). Prothonotary Warbler (Protonotaria citrea), version 1.0. In Birds of the World (A. F. Poole and F. B. Gill, Editors). Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Ithaca, NY, USA. https://doi.org/10.2173/bow.prowar.01
Tonra, Christopher M., et al. “Concentration of a Widespread Breeding Population in a Few Critically Important Nonbreeding Areas: Migratory Connectivity in the Prothonotary Warbler.” The Condor: Ornithological Applications, vol. 121, no. 2, 2019, duz019. https://doi.org/10.1093/condor/duz019
BirdCast. Cornell Lab of Ornithology and Colorado State University.
Moldenhauer, R. R. and D. J. Regelski (2020). Northern Parula (Setophaga americana), version 1.0. In Birds of the World (A. F. Poole, Editor). Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Ithaca, NY, USA. https://doi.org/10.2173/bow.norpar.01