The Stages of Birding: Yellow-rumped Warblers on the West Campus

I've been at this birding thing for about five years now, which marks me as a rank amateur, but by now I've started to recognize that there are "levels" of birding that for me run something like the following:

1) Total Ignorance: One is vaguely aware that birds are out there, but they're all pigeons, sparrows, crows, and mockingbirds. Birders are strange alien-like people with strange obsessions related to "life-lists" and "first-of-season". Colorful birds are interesting, but known to only live in other places.

2) First Stage Amateur: Somewhere along the way, one sees a very unusual bird, and has no good way of finding out what it was. They then take that tentative first step in birding by asking someone they know to be an expert what the species is, and are surprised to find that bird is actually common in the area, if one knows to watch for it. Experienced birders are still considered strange, but a little less so, in an eccentrically wise sort of way.

3) Second Stage Amateur: Having learned that there are many more birds in the region besides pigeons and sparrows and crows, one takes that ominous and tentative step of buying a bird book (by the time you've asked the expert about seven or eight times you realize you could try doing it yourself). Even though the book may be introductory in nature, one is shocked to find that bird species in the region number in the hundreds. This is a perilous moment, as some are overwhelmed by this complexity, give up, and fall away. Realizing the full breadth of the knowledge base of experienced birders, they are now considered demigods.

4) Tertiary Stage Amateur: One buys a camera with a good zoom lens. And binoculars. And a real bird book, like Sibleys or Audubon's. One starts altering the itinerary of vacations to include potential bird discoveries. But one isn't like those other birders with their life-lists and all. One just happens to like taking pictures of birds. Thousands of pictures of birds.

5) Quaternary Stage Amateur: One finds that he/she is keeping track of observed bird species, sometimes on a random sheet of paper, or perhaps even on a downloaded list of birds from the county or state. One day this person looks at the list and thinks "that's a lot of birds I've identified"...and they count them. They have passed into the realm of "life-list". This stage is completed when they start recording their finds on eBird or similar sites on the internet. Friends and family start asking them about the identity of some unusual bird they've observed. And the amateur knows many or most of the species...

6) First Stage Expert: I have no idea. I haven't reached that stage. And they're demigods anyway, something that we mere mortals cannot aspire to.

All in fun of course, but I started thinking about this amateur/beginning birder thing because of the Yellow-rumped Warblers (Setophaga coronata) I saw today in the sheep compound on the West Campus of Modesto Junior College. I was remembering how rare they seemed to be when I was just beginning to pay close attention to bird species, and how shocked I was to find that they were living by the dozens in the Mulberry tree in my own backyard. I ultimately realized they were a very common bird in the region at the right time of year, and I started to pay a bit less attention to them as I searched for rarer species. They were so flighty and active that I had trouble getting good photographs of them anyway.

But this afternoon I was standing next to a fence watching an Oak Titmouse build a nest, and I was so motionless that the birds came out of hiding, and a couple of the warblers perched on branches only a few feet away. They were just begging to be photographed, so I did. The opening picture of this post is by far the closest I've ever been to these birds. They are mostly going to be gone in a few weeks, moving up into the mountains to breed, and I'm realizing how much I'll miss them.

Winsome Little Warblers of the Yellow-rumped Kind in the MJC Mini-wilderness

I see that it has been an entire month since I've posted pictures of Yellow-rumped Warblers (also called Audubon's Warblers, latin name Setophaga coronata). It's hard not to. They are attractive little birds, and they are all over our campus in west Modesto. They are one of the most common species that I see in the central plaza area of the school.

We are getting on towards spring, so they may soon be leaving for their summer breeding grounds, which could be far to the north, or possibly in higher elevations of the Sierra Nevada (I've seen them on the road to Glacier Point at elevations of almost 8,000 feet).

In the meantime, it's fun to try and get decent pictures of these extremely active foragers. I got lucky in the last few trips around the campus and caught a couple of sharp shots I was happy with.

Butterbutts: Yellow-rumped Warblers at MJC and the Tuolumne River show Evolution in Action

In the days of my ignorance (actually not a thing of the past), all small birds were sparrows of some kind. Imagine my surprise when I started paying attention and discovered the dozens of colorful and interesting birds that weren't sparrows (most of them). Among the most beautiful are the little Yellow-rumped Warblers (Setophaga coronata), apparently also known as...butterbutts.

These are pretty little birds right now, but in a few weeks they will take on even brighter plumage as the breeding season commences. I may not see them as often as they tend to move up into the forests at that time. Right now they are flitting about in the trees in great numbers on my campus (all the following pictures), and along the Tuolumne River below where I live in Waterford (the two pictures above).

There is an interesting story concerning these little birds. Until 1973, they weren't "Yellow-rumped Warblers". They were an eastern species called a Myrtle Warbler, and a western species called the Audubon's Warbler. There are color differences, and differences in their calls. But...in 1973 they were combined into a single species because of a narrow region where the range of the two species overlapped. In that narrow region the two species were observed interbreeding and producing young, a long-term definition of a biological species. So now they are officially considered to be subspecies along with two others, the Black-fronted Warbler in Mexico, and the Goldman's Warbler in an isolated part of Guatemala. They're all Butterbutts, for the time being.

But change is afoot. Genetic research is far more advanced than it was in the 1970s, and DNA evidence indeed suggests that the four butterbutts should be considered species rather than subspecies. Part of the argument involves that fact that while they hybridize in that small zone of range overlap, the area of interbreeding has not expanded over time, as if the hybrids were not really viable.

These birds are a great example of how natural selection and evolution works to change and develop new species. As with the Scrub Jays that I discussed the other day, isolation is the driving force leading to changes. During the ice ages, the original populations of the warblers were separated by glaciers, and they remained isolated in the aftermath. The populations were subjected to different environmental conditions and different food sources, and over time little differences developed. Some of the variations allowed particular individuals to survive and pass on their genes to subsequent generations, and over time, the differences accumulated to the extent that they could no longer successfully interbreed. In other words, they were new species.

Because of the new research results, the North American Classification Committee of the American Ornithologists' Union may very well declare the four subspecies to be species once more. It's arbitrary in one sense, but the fact that there are blurry lines between possible species actually supports the idea of evolutionary change. There are simply not always sharply defined boundaries as divergence takes place.

In any case, these beautiful birds may be right in your own backyard. In ours they stayed away from the feeder and hung out in the Mulberry trees around the corner of the house, so I never thought to search for them. Nowadays, knowing where to look, I see them all the time. Have I mentioned that they aren't sparrows?

Audubon's (Yellow-rumped) Warbler on the West Campus

I'm finally seeing some warblers this week on campus while I'm working. I don't know if it was me, but the birds seemed to be hiding away. But the last two excursions around campus have produced some sightings. The Audubon's Warbler (Setophaga coronata) is the type of warbler I see most often. It used to be called the Yellow-rumped Warbler, which was good for random Google search hits, but is otherwise mildly insulting.

Most of those that I've seen have been perched high above in the "mini-wilderness". There's another that likes to land just outside of my lab on the third floor wall. It stays until I grab a camera, then takes off. Tonight I was trying to get some closer shots without success. Just as I gave up, one landed in the tree next to me, no more than 15-20 feet away. It stuck around for a couple of shots.

Audubon's (Yellow-rumped) Warbler Hiding in Plain Sight

There have been precious few chances for birdwatching of late, just stolen moments during lunch breaks, or a rare jaunt down to the Tuolumne River. I've been inundated by a combination of work and home projects. So it was that I was digging away in the backyard and stopped for a breather. Because I didn't have my camera, a Ruby-crowned Kinglet practically landed on my head. I went for the camera and the Kinglet was gone, but there were dozens of Yellow-rumped Warblers (Setophaga coronata) hopping about in the Mulberry trees. I got a couple of shots in the dying afternoon light.

I always thought "Yellow-rumped" was kind of an insulting name for a bird, and I later found that others thought the same thing. They had better reasons for not liking the name, because it had four distinct subspecies that were clearly different from each other. For years, arguments have raged over whether they were subspecies or distinct and different species altogether. The pendulum is swinging back towards separate species, based on DNA and genetics research. I'm fine with that, since the little rumps would become Audubon's Warblers, a name with much more charisma and gravitas. Although, I have to admit that my first post on the Yellow-rumps had the greatest number of hits of any post on this blog. Since most of my hits come from Google searches, I don't want to speculate why.