A bashful beauty
May 2nd, 2011
The Northern Parula is one of my favorite birds.
It's a tiny warbler, no bigger than a kinglet, with a bright yellow breast and, on the breeding male, some rusty banding across the throat. Its back usually looks grey, but if you see it close up and in just the right light, it turns a lovely shade of sky blue. (All blue birds are like that, to some extent--lighting-dependent, I mean. It's because the blue comes not from pigment, but from the way light refracts through specially-shaped feathers.)
Parulas are rather shy birds. It's not that they're particularly scared of humans, per se, just that their whole lifestyle seems designed around self-concealment. They don't fly much (except in migration), or hop out into the open much. They'll spend hours quietly creeping around in treetops hunting for crawling insects. Even when a parula sings (a song Roger Tory Peterson described as a buzzy tril "that climbs the scale and trips over at the top"), he often sings in mid-forage, not bothering to come out from behind his leafy cover.
The impression of shyness is completed by parula nesting habits. They require, in the south, woods festooned with spanish moss; here in the north, they use the similar Old Man's Beard lichen. Their nests are concealed within clumps of the moss.
So you might imagine they're tricky to photograph! I was at one for over an hour and never got my golden moment: the moment when the bird comes low, out in the open, in excellent light and well-posed, and I get in a shot in the millisecond I have before he hops back under cover. And it's not blurry. (With birds as hyperactive as most warblers, "not blurry" can be a challenge in itself.) Still, I got a few worth sharing.
Did I mention, bashful? :-)
This photo shows another key field mark: a suffuse greenish-yellow patch on the middle of the back. It's particularly handy when identifying females.
May 2nd, 2011
The Northern Parula is one of my favorite birds.
It's a tiny warbler, no bigger than a kinglet, with a bright yellow breast and, on the breeding male, some rusty banding across the throat. Its back usually looks grey, but if you see it close up and in just the right light, it turns a lovely shade of sky blue. (All blue birds are like that, to some extent--lighting-dependent, I mean. It's because the blue comes not from pigment, but from the way light refracts through specially-shaped feathers.)
Parulas are rather shy birds. It's not that they're particularly scared of humans, per se, just that their whole lifestyle seems designed around self-concealment. They don't fly much (except in migration), or hop out into the open much. They'll spend hours quietly creeping around in treetops hunting for crawling insects. Even when a parula sings (a song Roger Tory Peterson described as a buzzy tril "that climbs the scale and trips over at the top"), he often sings in mid-forage, not bothering to come out from behind his leafy cover.
The impression of shyness is completed by parula nesting habits. They require, in the south, woods festooned with spanish moss; here in the north, they use the similar Old Man's Beard lichen. Their nests are concealed within clumps of the moss.
So you might imagine they're tricky to photograph! I was at one for over an hour and never got my golden moment: the moment when the bird comes low, out in the open, in excellent light and well-posed, and I get in a shot in the millisecond I have before he hops back under cover. And it's not blurry. (With birds as hyperactive as most warblers, "not blurry" can be a challenge in itself.) Still, I got a few worth sharing.
Did I mention, bashful? :-)
This photo shows another key field mark: a suffuse greenish-yellow patch on the middle of the back. It's particularly handy when identifying females.
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