The general theory of spring migration in the Florida Keys is that it lasts from about April 15 to May 15. But it’s only a general theory. Birds follow trends more than they follow rules.
It’s not as if anyone is there waving a green flag, telling them to go. They have to wait until the quality and amount of light changes, the weather changes, and their endocrine systems gear up to start pumping the right volume of the right hormones to wave the metaphorical green flag. Except they don’t always take off just then. The stars need to be visible, the wind needs to be favorable, or at least favorable-ish. Coming from South America and the Caribbean, flying over all that water, they need to have built up their fat stores for the airborne ultramarathon ahead. And these are just the variables we know about. There are the tendencies of different species, but there are also the tendencies of individuals.
Males tend to migrate first, so they can claim territory and act all impressive when the females arrive.
There have been signs that migration was about to kick in for a couple weeks. The reappearance of common grackles, squawking it up around town, is a known precursor to the cavalcade of birds that will follow. The sight of the occasional swallow-tailed kite making landfall after crossing the Gulf of Mexico (yeah, I said it) before slow-looping its way north, is also always a harbinger of change. Also, barn swallows swirling around anywhere bugs are to be found is another sign.
The thing about migration, specifically what days you get to see migrant birds in the Keys, is, it’s not a steady, linear thing. It’s not even on a bell curve. It’s stochastic – some days you’re overwhelmed by how much you see, some days nothing much is going on, a lot of days are in between, and in the end it usually all averages out.
Isak Dinesen, a.k.a Karen Blixen, once said she tried to write a little bit every day, without hope, and without despair. I’ve always used that notion as sort of a mantra, sometimes about writing, sometimes about other things. If possible, just do the thing without letting your doubts and/or delusions dictate the terms. (I am not always, or arguably even mostly, successful at this.)
I was thinking about Dinesen’s line and trying to achieve that state of detached equilibrium, of being dispassionate about a passion, as I drove into Fort Zachary Taylor State Park the other morning, a week after migration officially began. Mark Whiteside had texted me on Saturday about seeing a Townsend’s warbler out at the Botanical Garden, and then there had been a report of one at Fort Zach on Sunday. So things were afoot.
A Townsend’s warbler is a West Coast bird, and doesn’t have a lot of business being here. But birds do wander, and we get one or two in the Keys every couple of years. I was not going to admit to myself that I hoped to see one, but I wasn’t going to be averse to it if I did.
Fort Zach is currently about half open, the rest blocked so they can replace the sand on the beach that periodically gets blown out by hurricanes and other storms. But despite the yellow tape everywhere, there was still a good bit of habitat worth birding.
Almost immediately I heard the least terns calling out their frenetic, high-pitched, too-fast-to-parse Morse code to each other. I’d actually been listening for them over at the federal courthouse on Simonton Street, where they like to nest on the roof, but hadn’t heard them yet. No doubt they’re all just getting back and reacquainted, and will settle in to pair off and raise chicks in the next few weeks.
I spent a few minutes staring up at the sky, trying to catch sight of the least terns I was hearing, but it is easy to miss small white birds flying in front of big white clouds.
I headed into the low part of the hammock first, keeping my eyes on the leaf litter, thinking there was a high probability of seeing an ovenbird and a low probability of seeing the far more discreet Swainson’s warbler, but all I saw were curly-tailed lizards, which pushed the emotional needle that I was ignoring a few points towards despair.
Warblers, which make up the bulk of the migrant species you see in the Keys, tend to move around in mixed flocks, and not seeing any in a half-acre of hammock doesn’t really mean anything. That, or I was wasting my morning. One of the two.
Somewhere beneath all the noise from the least terns I heard, relatively close, a black-whiskered vireo, one of those species that breeds here but doesn’t get much north of central Florida. I hustled up the incline where I met a pair of birders from Virginia. The woman told me they were really hoping to see a black-whiskered Vireo. I told her I just heard one. She said, no, that was her playing the call.
Sigh.
But right after that, a black-and-white warbler popped out on the branch of a gumbo limbo. Then there was a northern parula, then a Cape-May warbler, then the best bird of the morning, a golden-winged warbler.
There are a lot of reasons to like a golden-wing. For one, anything with golden in the name sounds classy. But also, the bird lives up to it, with a flashy bright yellow patch on each wing, and a similar bright yellow cape, plus some dramatic black and white facial markings. And they’re not common here, and only slightly more common in their breeding habitat, the high Appalachians.
There were another dozen species after that, making it pretty a mid-range day for migration birding in the Keys. But it definitely tilted the table away from despair, which, I’m pretty sure, is an assessment that even Isak Dinesen would allow in after-the-fact retrospection. As long as I wasn’t too hopeful about the next time I went out.
