The cadence of a songbird’s daily life, of its moment-to-moment motions, are generally faster than we can follow. The speed at which they hop from place to place, flap their wings, peck at bugs and gulp them down – even the speed at which they mate – is generally too quick for the pokey human eye.
Sometimes you can snap a picture of them in motion, freeze a moment in time and space and see something you’ve never seen before – the way they throw their wings or point their feet. Usually this is when they are initiating a move and leaping up. But exponentially more often than not, you miss the shot.
Naked eyed, at best you catch a blur. Mostly what you can see are the brief moments between actions.
This gets truer and truer the smaller a songbird is.
I was thinking about this the other day at Fort Zach when I was trying to take pictures of warblers and getting frustrated due to their inconsiderate disregard of my intentions. It was all zip zip zip, and then whenever one of them would briefly pause, they would be behind a branch, or only their butt would be sticking out from behind a leaf.
It was a bit of a relief when I caught sight of a gray catbird shooting across the path. Even though it was a gray blur, I knew it was a gray catbird because gray catbirds are on the bigger end of the songbird spectrum, which meant it was slightly slower than the warblers I’d been failing to photograph. In a quarter of an instant I could size it and catch the fact that the bird was essentially two shades of gray with not even a whiff of any other field marks.
I thought I could gain some traction by getting a decent shot of it, and moving on to the more difficult birds from there. But this bird was too frenetic, more amped up than the catbirds I usually see, shooting back across the path into different random bushes.
Gray catbirds fall into the category of Birds With Apt Names because they are gray and their contact calls sound very much like a mewing cat. On a scale of one to five stars, I would give them four stars, because while their name is apt, it is a little dull. (This particular catbird’s freneticism made me think it wasn’t so much of a catbird as a scaredy catbird, but that shouldn’t be reflected in species-wide nomenclature.)
But it got me thinking about the aptness of different bird names, and I continued on with the rating of them after that.
Since most of the birds I was seeing had the word “warbler” in their name, the first question was, how suitable a name is it? The name, of course, comes from the bird’s song. You tend to think of warbles as coming from people or creatures who can’t control their voice, voices that are not confident or competent in their output. A warble is generally equated with a trill or a quaver.
This is complicated by the fact that New World warblers were named after their superficial resemblance to Old World warblers, but the two families are not closely related. (This is complicated slightly more by the fact that the olive warbler is in neither family. Because someone always has to be difficult. But in the context of this mission the complication is mooted by the fact that in North America, they are only found in Arizona and New Mexico.)
To my ear, though, the songs of the Old World warblers and the New World warblers sound like they are generally in the same avian musical genre, with lots of fast clear notes.
So it is possible, by modern definitions, that warbler is not quite fit for the species in both families. Except, if you do a deeper dive on the etymology of the concept of warbling, the definition of the term in the 1300s was of “a stream of clear, rapid, gliding, melodious tones.” At least according to one etymology website online. So I’m going to allow it as a suitable descriptor.
The most prominent species I was seeing was the palm warbler. They were flitting around by the half dozen. They are probably the most common songbird you see in the Keys from October through May. Usually they are mellow creatures, stalking around in small groups in the grass looking for bugs. But at the park they were getting all aggressive with each other, chasing each other off for no reason, even though there is no territory or food supply they needed to compete for here. Most likely it was because their hormones were starting to kick in before they migrated back to their breeding territories in Canada.
But the name seems inapt, because they don’t breed anywhere with palm trees, and are not seen in palm trees all that often when they are in more tropical climes. Palm trees don’t seem to have much to do with their lives. And I’ve never seen one land on the inner surface of anyone’s hand. So two stars.
There were a couple Cape May warblers around – two males and a female that I saw. Their name comes from the fact that the first one described to science was collected in Cape May, New Jersey. Cape May is a wonderful place to bird (the Cape May Bird Observatory is an ornithological juggernaut). And you have to love any city smart enough to preserve its historical architecture. But the species breeds in boreal Canada and winters in the Caribbean. The name tells you nothing about the species except the place where one of them got shot. One star.
I caught a few quick glimpses of a worm-eating warbler, a name that has always stuck in my craw. Sure, they eat worms, but so do a lot of birds. Why saddle them with such a judgmental name? Two stars.
Lest I come off as a total crank here, I did see at least two black-and-white warblers, a species covered with parallel-ish black and white streaks, all of them as clear and sharp as the text on a page of a newspaper. Simple, elegant, to the point. Five stars.
Five species in and I find myself out of space. Considering that there are about 10,000 bird species in the world, and around 800 species in North America, this may have to be an ongoing project. But it’s a start.
