Northern Parula
On a very warm, sunny day with clouds beginning to gather, a female Northern Parula flew into a thicket right along the roadside, and almost at eye level. It almost startled me, it was so close and so vivid – a small, stubby bird with a short tail, and a clear, glowing lemon-yellow throat and chest, very greenish back, blue-gray head, and what at first appeared to be a white eye-ring and white wing bars. The eye-ring was actually white arcs over and under the eye. This female showed no sign of the blurry, rusty-coral band across the chest that would quickly identify a male, and that some females also show more faintly. It’s another first of the season bird for me, and I have not yet heard the male’s buzzy, trilled song.
A Northern Parula is a small wood warbler that winters in Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean, and returns to eastern North America to nest in forested areas, usually along streams or wetlands. I’ve been pleasantly surprised to have them nesting here in our woods for several years now – it’s really more a woodland than a forest here, a very fragmented woodland, but the creeks and young hardwood trees seem to be okay with them. Their colorful, and yet exotically dusky appearance and sultry song always remind me of Spanish moss and deep southern woods in the Lowcountry– though they’re not uncommon even much further north of here.