This winter, for the first time since we moved here to Summit Grove twenty years ago, I have not seen or heard a single Golden-crowned Kinglet \u2013 until today. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Golden-crowned Kinglets are very small, charming birds that we only find here during the winter season. They nest and spend the summer in forests further north. A Golden-crowned Kinglet is a tiny, roundish gray bird with hints of yellow, thin white wing bars, a black-and-white striped face, and a flashing crown of yellow and orange. They flit very quickly through the branches of pines and bare hardwoods, searching for small insects, and often move with feeding flocks of other small winter birds like chickadees, titmice, nuthatches, and Ruby-crowned Kinglets.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The calls of Golden-crowned Kinglets are very high, thin, faintly buzzy \u2013 ti-ti-ti \u2013 <\/em>a familiar sound in the winter here. Most of the time I hear them before seeing them, because they tend to stay up fairly high, especially \u2013 though not always \u2013 in pines and other evergreens. <\/p>\n\n\n\n But today, I didn\u2019t hear the calls at all. The day was cold, crisp, and brightly sunny, with a soft blue sky and lots of high, long streaks and veils of white clouds. I was walking up a hill past a small patch of trees and tangled undergrowth, when the flickering movement of a small bird caught my eye. When I stopped to take a closer look with binoculars, I saw a very vivid, pretty little Golden-crowned Kinglet. Its crown was bright, deep yellow-gold. And all of the markings were very clean and clear. <\/p>\n\n\n\n It was moving in a characteristic, quick, flitting way at about eye level in a small, bare-limbed tree, making its way intently over the branches. As it moved, it was not calling the familiar ti-ti-ti <\/em>\u2013 it was chirping<\/em> in a tiny, quiet, but distinct way. Chirp. Chirp. <\/em>It made this very short, one-syllable chirping call over and over again as it moved. I don\u2019t think I\u2019ve ever heard this call from a Golden-crowned Kinglet before, and I have not been able to find it mentioned or described in species accounts, or in a recording. It was definitely not singing \u2013 but the Golden-crowned Kinglet\u2019s song is described as complex, and these notes might have been similar to parts of it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n I watched it for several minutes as it moved through the branches of small trees on the side of the road, staying down close to eye level. I never heard the ti-ti-ti <\/em>calls. I also looked and listened for another Golden-crowned Kinglet nearby and could not find one, though it\u2019s certainly possible there were others that I just didn\u2019t see. There also didn\u2019t seem to be a feeding flock of other small songbirds nearby. This one little jewel-like bird seemed to be alone.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Like many North American songbirds, populations of Golden-crowned Kinglets have declined alarmingly in the past several decades, but they are still described as numerous. Although they used to nest mostly in far northern spruce-fir forests, their breeding range has been expanding further south, into the midwestern U.S and the Appalachians. The reason for their winter disappearance in our own neighborhood may be largely the result of habitat changes here, especially the loss of trees, and fragmentation of more and more woodlands both here and in surrounding areas. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" This winter, for the first time since we moved here to Summit Grove twenty years ago, I have not seen or heard a single Golden-crowned Kinglet \u2013 until today. Golden-crowned Kinglets are very small, charming birds that we only find here during the winter season. They nest and spend the summer in forests further north. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/birdingnotes.sigridsanders.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2258"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/birdingnotes.sigridsanders.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/birdingnotes.sigridsanders.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/birdingnotes.sigridsanders.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/birdingnotes.sigridsanders.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2258"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/birdingnotes.sigridsanders.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2258\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2260,"href":"https:\/\/birdingnotes.sigridsanders.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2258\/revisions\/2260"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/birdingnotes.sigridsanders.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2258"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/birdingnotes.sigridsanders.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2258"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/birdingnotes.sigridsanders.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2258"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}