NatureZen: Fall Warbler Fashion
words and photos by Melissa McMasters
Here in Memphis, wood-warblers are birds that we see only in fleeting glimpses. Just a few species breed this far south, so our encounters with them are limited to a few weeks during their spring and fall migrations. After a winter of slow, contemplative forest walks, the arrival of these colorful and frenetic little birds in spring makes my heart beat faster. They don’t stop moving, so neither do I. In hopes of getting even a two-second glimpse of one at eye level, I often walk for hours every day, generally to find that the birds are mostly interested in the insects at the top of the canopy.
Fall is a bit different. Less urgent. In the spring, warblers are in a hurry to get up north to their breeding grounds to stake out the best territories and start looking for a suitable mate. In the fall, they can afford to take a little more time, as long as there’s food and water available on their route. This more leisurely pace means we have a larger window in the fall to appreciate them, and right now the Old Forest and its edges are flush with flashes of yellow.
But that yellow, in a lot of cases, is more muted in the fall than it is in the spring. That’s because the adult warblers molt during the summer, replacing their feathers with a set that’s less ostentatious. The birds that were born this summer start out with these softer colors as well. This makes it a bit challenging to reconcile the mental image I made in the spring with the one I’m getting in the fall, but a little practice (and yes, more multi-hour walks) has me feeling more confident as the years go by. In most cases, the key is to remember that the birds are changing outfits, but they have the same sense of style.
Here are some side-by-side images of warblers I’ve seen in Overton Park in the spring and again in the fall. You’ll notice a lot of fealty to a pattern!
Black-throated green warblers just replace their extremely dark throat feathers with a less bold version. Imagine you’ve selected a “deepest noir” paint chip from the hardware store, but after sitting with it for a while, you decide this is a bit much and you’d prefer “beard of charcoal.”
The same principle applies to Canada warblers. They’ll still wear a necklace during the winter, but it’s no longer a statement piece.
Northern parulas keep the sunsets on their chests and the signature eyering that breaks in the center, but the gray on their heads and wings loses its bluish tint.
Birds that woo their mates with brooding dark masks dial back the intrigue in the fall. The golden-winged warblers keep their eponymous yellow patches but fade their darker feathers.
Yellow-rumped warblers, which we have the pleasure of watching all winter long, retain a lot of their markings (white wingbars, streaky breast, yellow flushes on their flanks and above their tails) but their summer masks disappear completely.
In most years, the warbler I see most during both spring and fall migration is the magnolia warbler. In the spring, it outdoes most of the other birds by sporting both a mask and a necklace, but in the fall, sometimes there’s only the barest hint of a necklace on females and immature males. You can just see the thick band across the throat echoing from the spring adult male to the fall bird, but what I love is that the shape of their faces is unmistakably the same across these two images. I know the adult male is trying to give off virile vibes here, but it can’t be helped: these birds are just cute.
If the subtlety of their fall markings seems confusing, never fear–there’s a solid way to identify magnolia warblers no matter the season. They’ll always have a wide black band at the tip of their tails, with white feathers stretching to the base of their bellies.
Adult male American redstarts look like nothing else we see in our area, and they look fairly consistent all year. But females and immature males trade Halloween colors for a lemony yellow and mousy gray. The tail tells the tale here, too, though–and since these birds love to fan their feathers, it’s never too difficult to distinguish them. This week, I stumbled into a small flock of first-year redstarts, all of whom were flitting about and flashing their uniquely patterned tails as though they’d just discovered them. So charming!
Tail feathers also come in handy when trying to identify the warblers that don’t look particularly similar from spring to fall. Chestnut-sided warblers look like they’ve been smeared with a maroon crayon down their sides in the spring, but in the fall there’s often no hint of that. Also gone are the black feathers framing their faces, which has the effect of changing their expression from “stern” to “very puzzled as to how I got here.” But the snowy white belly culminating in a white tail outlined in black feathers remains the same.
That bright olive color on the chestnut-sided warbler’s head is also found on Tennessee warblers…but primarily in fall and winter. Yes, while most birds save their glam period for the summertime, our namesake bird goes blonde in the winter instead. One can only take being called “drab,” “dingy,” and “dull” so many times before deciding it’s time for a glow-up.
Bay-breasted warblers can be tricky, because many of them lose their rich rusty wash in the fall, along with their smoky facial feathers. If you can spot them in flight, you’ll look for striped backs as one clue. But for me, the best tip-off is behavior. These relatively chunky warblers stay a bit lower than some of the others, and while they’re still constantly in motion, they don’t move as fast. Basically, if a warbler looks fairly substantial and it’s low and slow enough for me to get a good look, there’s a good chance it’s this one!
Blackpoll warblers are where I cry uncle. Adult males look nothing like immature males, or even particularly like females. The only surefire clue is the orange legs combined with the two white wingbars, but some blackpolls don’t even have orange legs. Unfortunately, it’s also pretty hard to practice blackpoll identification in the fall: they generally migrate over the Atlantic Ocean, sometimes covering the entire distance from the northern U.S. to South America in a single flight! For this, they deserve immense congratulations…which we’ll give them when we see them again in the springtime.
