Yellow Warbler
Warblers
Every spring our small woodlot and the brush in front of our home here in Port Maitland become the abode of warblers. They fill the property with their varied songs, and flit back and forth, sometimes in an obvious mating display, sometimes searching for food and sometimes just here temporarily as they move to breeding grounds further north.
This means that making identification can be tricky for two reasons – one is that there are so many of them and two is that they don’t sit still very long. I was thrilled to get this Yellow Warbler, I think, to sit still and have his picture taken, but I have to admit, I’m a bit more Emersonian in my birding.
Cousin Ralph Waldo Emerson was apparently content to just let the birds be and listen to them. In his journal fellow Concord, Massachusetts resident Henry David Thoreau occasionally references a bird he calls the “night-warbler,” which Thoreau never positively identifies. He told Emerson about the “night-warbler”, and it was Emerson who advised him not to try to identify the bird because it was important to leave some mystery in nature.
I must say, as a former Concord resident myself, these two men were of great inspiration to me, and I always love to read what they had to say about nature.
In this instance, I think Emerson is more up my alley, so here you have a warbler. Probably a Yellow Warbler, but hey, maybe it should be a mystery.
