(HOST) The word “fallout” is most often associated with undesirable events, but commentator Tom Slayton says that in the world of bird-watching, it can be a very good thing indeed.
(SLAYTON) The other day I was sitting at my upstairs window, noodling away on the computer, when I happened to look into the branches of the crabapple tree outside. Sitting there, not four feet from the end of my nose, was a Blackburnian warbler!
Now, this is a very small bird, about four inches in length. But completely spectacular! Its head looked as if someone had dumped a bucket of orange paint over it. It was bright orange with black stripes across the crown; and the bird had a flaming, red-orange throat.
The little bird lit up the chilly gray day like a blast of summer sunshine. That’s when I really understood — there was a warbler fallout going on.
Bryan Pfeiffer, my sometime birding guru, had just posted an e-mail report: he’d seen twenty-one warbler species, and a lot of other birds, in a single morning at Berlin Pond. Across Vermont, the story was the same. Suddenly, there were warblers everywhere: Cape May warblers, Black-throated Green warblers, Parula warblers, Tennessee warblers, Chestnut sided warblers, and more. Even a couple of rare Cerulean warblers had been spotted.
May had actually gotten off to a slow start. On May 1, there was nary a yellow warbler to be found at Berlin Pond — and the pond is normally warbler alley in May.
But no matter. Last week’s big warbler fallout more than made up for the early drought.
A warbler fallout is literally that — warblers falling out of the sky. Bad weather in the spring can actually be good weather for birders. A day that is wet, cold, and windy is just as discouraging to migrating birds as it is to most people. But birders love it when a big low-pressure system comes to town at the height of migration season. Then a lot of the birds that are migrating over us get cold and tired of bucking the wind and rain. They drop into a handy tree and wait for the bad weather to pass over.
That’s when alert birders don their rain gear and binoculars and go out looking for birds. Last week was one of those great times to look. Birders all across Vermont filed glowing, excited reports, and the weekly rare bird count soared into the stratosphere.
This week, good weather came back, and it was the birds doing the soaring. That, and the leaves coming out on all the trees brought sightings back to normal seasonal levels.
No matter. Vermont is still one of the best places to see birds this time of year.
In fact, a new program sponsored by the Vermont Audubon Society confirms that northern New England, including Vermont, is one of the best places in the country to see forest birds. Audubon obviously wants to keep it that way. So they’re working with forest land owners — for free — to help them manage their forest land to benefit the birds that live there. It’s one of the ways we humans can help the natural world do its everyday spring magic.
We all ultimately depend on nature. It’s what sustains us. Now is a great time of year to be in the woods. And who knows, if you get out there, you might just witness the next big warbler fallout!
Tom Slayton is editor-emeritus of Vermont Life magazine.