Hermit warblers spotted in area

PLEASANT VALLEY —  This time of year, any species of warbler caught flitting along the frozen banks of the Farmington River would be big news. So when resident Dave Rosgen saw the tiny, warbler-sized songbird fly into the top of a sycamore tree beside the Route 318 bridge in Pleasant Valley, he said it had to be something special. 

“It gave a chip call note just like a black-throated green warbler,” Rosgen wrote in the www.eBird.com record, a website where people document their bird sightings for science. “When I got my binoculars focused on it I saw that it had a completely bright yellow head, except for some black on the nape, with a beady black eye like a yellow warbler.”

It was a hermit warbler.

Rosgen studied the details of its plumage for five minutes as it “foraged among the sycamore seed balls.” It eventually crossed the river and went out of sight, but he later matched what he had seen to pictures of a hermit warbler. Based on its plumage, it seemed to be a first-year bird, just hatched last summer. “It appeared to be very healthy,” added Rosgen.

Warblers are the tiny colorful gems that get birders really excited, many species only seen when passing through on spring and fall migrations. A hermit warbler is not rare, exactly. Its population is considered stable, though perhaps vulnerable due to its specialized habitat and small range, according to Cornell Lab. It’s just that its breeding range consists of tall coniferous forests along the West Coast—northern California, western Washington and Oregon. 

And right now, it should be in Mexico or Central America. Any warbler that breeds in North America, with the exception of two species, should be on tropical wintering grounds now. 

Elusive hermit warbler

Word got out, and birders came to search, but the hermit warbler wasn’t showing itself. On Feb. 7, a week after Rosgen saw it, Nick Bonomo wrote on the listserv of the Connecticut Ornithological Association: “A search party of seven of us headed up this morning to spread out and scour the area of Dave’s original sighting, and [somewhat surprisingly] it did not take us more than an hour to relocate the bird! Fran Zygmont first re-spotted it.”

For the next week, birders came to see the rarity, which could be found foraging along the river in the vicinity of the bridge, either down along the banks in the mud and ice, or higher in the trees. It reportedly showed little fear of people. Robert Dixon wrote that sometimes those photographing the bird “just stopped shooting and watched as it foraged around their feet!”

Warblers mainly eat insects to survive. 

Greg Hanisek wrote, “This bird is clearly thriving at the moment, primarily by eating various arthropods picked up along the edge of the water. It probably also is finding arthropod eggs, larvae and pupae in trees. ... A surprising amount of the animal material is available all winter in bark crevices, needle clusters, evergreen cones etc. for birds capable of extracting it.” 

“These birds can be surprisingly hardy,” wrote Patrick Comins, director of bird conservation for Audubon Connecticut. Still, the temperature was soon forecast to plummet below zero, and people put out suet and mealworms to help it along. 

This little hermit warbler was only the second state record—one appeared in New Haven in May 1977. A handful of records exist from the Northeast, mostly late fall and winter sightings, and a few in the spring. They’ve shown up in Long Island, Quebec, twice in central Massachusetts. One hung out in Martha’s Vineyard for several months in the winter of 1997. 

“It’s not all that unusual for western species to show up here, particularly around the Thanksgiving timeframe,” said Comins, who pointed to other vagrants currently in the state: a Townsend’s solitaire in Greenwich, a painted bunting, a western flycatcher. While it’s possible that something is off in their navigation, he explained that most likely, these birds get caught up in a rip current going from the Southwest to the Northeast.

The hermit warbler was seen on Feb. 13, the start of the brief but extreme cold snap, but no one could find it after that. The pool where it had heavily foraged for aquatic insects froze over.  “It’s possible it moved somewhere else,” said Comins, “but it seems likely that it didn’t make it through that cold night.”

Clearly, this bird was an inspiration to all who saw it. As Joe Budrow wrote, “Who would have dreamed of seeing a warbler on ice here in Connecticut?”