Okay, @lies, I have another birdwatching puzzle for you! Today I went for a little walk in Tilden Regional Park with my parents. At one point I saw something flitting around from branch to branch in the bushes. With some patience, I managed to get a better look–at first it just seemed to be tiny, brown, and fluffy, but then I saw that it had some yellow on it–the face was yellow, just around the beak (the beak was orange) and there might’ve been a little yellow on the wings. It was visited and possibly fed by a yellower bird with a black cap who I didn’t get as good a look at. I think it might have been a fledgling Wilson’s warbler being fed by a parent? It had the look of a juvenile bird–still some downy bits. But I don’t think I’d ever seen a Wilson’s warbler in person before, and I’m not confident about this. Thoughts?
Circumstantial evidence: someone else on eBird did see Wilson’s warblers in that park today (on the other hand, it’s a very large park so they might not have been in that part of it). Also, I don’t think it was a lesser goldfinch (that being the other yellow bird with a black cap that I’m familiar with), because I see those all the time and I think I would’ve recognised it, plus the beak seemed too thin and the pictures of juvenile lesser goldfinches on the internet looked really different from this one.
Yeah, I think you’ve got it: a fledgling Wilson’s Warbler being visited and fed by its parent. There are a lot of juvenile birds around right now, and they can be tricky to identify due to their less-distinctive and less-often-seen plumages. But a distinctive-looking parent visiting them is usually a giveaway, and even seen briefly the other bird you describe seems very likely to be a Wilson’s warbler.
I’m not positive, but I think Tilden Regional Park might be named after Bill Tilden, the late entomologist who wrote the definitive study on the insect associates of coyote brush. I’d like to visit it some day, not only to see the birds but also to check out the galls and assorted other bugs on the coyote brush there.
By consistently presenting nature as an untouched wilderness, many nature documentaries mislead viewers into thinking that there are lots of untouched wildernesses left. I certainly thought there were, before I became an environmental journalist. This misapprehension then prompts people to build their environmental ideas around preserving untouched places and to embrace profoundly antihuman “solutions” to environmental problems, such as kicking indigenous people out of their homeland. In truth, wilderness doesn’t really exist.
In his famous 1995 essay, “The Trouble With Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature,” the historian William Cronon demolished the concept of wilderness. Cronon argued that European settlers in North America had transformed their inherited idea of “wilderness” as worthless, scary, and unimproved land by reimagining it as a sublime, prehuman Eden. “The myth of the wilderness as ‘virgin’ uninhabited land had always been especially cruel when seen from the perspective of the Indians who had once called that land home,” Cronon wrote. In reality, the Americas had already been thoroughly shaped by the nearly 60 million people who lived there when colonists first arrived. Agriculture and other intensive human use was widespread, covering 10 percent of the Americas’ landmass; human-caused fires maintained grasslands and prairies; hunting, foraging, gathering, and replanting—sometimes in new places—regulated the populations and ranges of dozens of species.
The wilderness myth is simply factually inaccurate, in the Americas and elsewhere. It has also been a real stumbling block for conservation. With wilderness set as the gold standard for nature, any human influence has come to be seen as negative by default. The myth has thus ruled out any approaches to saving nature except walling it off and keeping humans out. Trying to “save the planet” with a wilderness mindset has been all about self-exile. It offers “little hope of discovering what an ethical, sustainable, honorable human place in nature might actually look like,” as Cronon wrote.
There is no such thing as wilderness except possibly parts of Antarctica.
“On your black-and-white birds, did you look at white-throated swifts? Because that’s sort of what your description sounds like.”
Aha! Yes! That must be what they were. Nothing else seems to look even close to right. Thank you!!!
(It now occurs to me that I should have checked eBird to see what other people had reported… though I couldn’t have done it there because of being mostly unplugged. I’ve just checked now, and a few days ago someone did report the white-throated swift in Pinnacles, and even on the trail we took.)
I am really very bad at distinguishing swallows and swifts (either between those two larger types or different species within one of them). In this case, I was further confused by the fact that there are definitely also violet-green swallows at the park, but I don’t know whether I saw any–it’s likely that not all of the swifts/swallows I saw were the same species, especially since the second day, which is actually when I was able to make out this black-and-white underside, we hiked through a slightly different habitat.
Thanks again!
Not that you (or anyone) should want to watch me talk for an hour about identifying swallows and swifts, but you can, if you really want to, do exactly that. What a time to be alive, huh?
All three snowy plover chicks at Carpinteria State Beach are still going strong. I shot this video of them and their dad this morning.
Maximum cuteness.
Are… are they chasing fleas? How could you stand being on that beach?!
Well, they’re sometimes called sand fleas, or sandhoppers. But they’re mellow little jumping amphipods. See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talitridae. No biting of humans involved.
Those are the clear-ish jumping thingies. The smaller dark things are kelp flies, also quite benign.
People sometimes complain about wrack (washed up seaweed) and the invertebrates that associate with it. They prefer a raked, sanitized beach devoid of as much non-human life as possible. I hold a different opinion, as do plovers.
It was their beach for a long time before we moved in and started waging ecocide.
Glad to hear that they don’t bite humans! I spent yesterday dodging houseflies, and did get stung by some mystery evil smaller fly while trying to get to a wetland. Didn’t spot a single bird, and I’m no good with audio.
I just found and read your blog post cataloguing these plovers from egg to toddler, and man I am rooting for them. The single father of newborn triplets fighting off a gull like 20 times his size to keep it from eating his babies! What drama!
Glad to hear you’re rooting for them! Everyone at the campground by that beach has been super into them. The local paper ran a story today calling the birds celebrities. 🙂
