Yellow-rumped Warbler

Affectionately known as “Butterbutts,” Yellow-rumped Warblers do indeed have lemon-yellow backsides, and are common in the summer. Formerly, four subspecies of Butterbutt were considered separate species; the above was an Audubon’s Warbler and the below was a Myrtle Warbler. Why someone decided to change “Myrtle” to “Yellow-rumped,” I will never understand.

 The warbler family is a group of mostly yellow birds that prefer to dine on insects. They enjoy poking around in flowering trees to eat the insects that are attracted to them. Butterbutts are unique in their family because they have the ability to digest waxy fruit; thus, they are able to overwinter much farther north than other warbler species and subside on berries throughout the winter. This means that they avoid the perils of migration, but as a consequence they can be caught by the oddball snow storms that the North throws around in late spring and early fall.

A Butterbutt flashing us a sliver of his yellow rump.

I saw these warblers April 30 at Queen Elizabeth Park, with dozens of their friends. I’m off to the Prairies this summer to monitor birds, so this will be the last blog post for a while. I’m going to be up to my gills in nesting warblers, flycatchers, and vireos in the boreal forest! Thank you all for reading and I hope you have great summer wherever you might be.

House Finch

House Finches have all the characteristics of a good finch – a short, fat bill, brightly coloured males, a social disposition, and a cheerful, chatty song. They use their strong beaks to crack open seeds, or to munch on buds and flowers. Males range from yellow to bright red based on the pigments they obtain from their diet. Females are a drab brown, but they prefer the reddest males. A deep red face is not only a great look; it also shows that the finch is committed to a balanced diet with a complete set of nutrients.

House Finches are native to western North America, from Mexico up to southern BC. In the 1940s, an aspiring entrepreneur captured a number of birds and brought them to New York to sell them as caged “Hollywood Finches.”  When nobody wanted to buy the poor birds, he set them loose. Like good finches, they set to reproducing immediately, and now House Finches are abundant all over the eastern States. Despite being an introduced species, they are much less vilified than European Starlings and House Sparrows. (Whether they actually cause less harm to native species in the east is beside the point, because they’re so darn pretty.)

I saw this house finch in our neighbour’s tree on April 20, having a delicious meal of cherry blossoms with his friend.

The house finch's friend has deep red feathers that puts our orange one's to shame.

Double-crested Cormorant

Photo credit to Liz Stewart

Cormorants are fish-eaters to the bone, literally: dense bones, large webbed feet, and feathers that aren’t waterproof make it easy for them to hunt underwater. Unfortunately these characteristics make them look quite undignified above the surface. Unlike ducks and geese, they don’t want to spend too much time soaking in the water. They prefer to rest on buoys, bridges, or pilings, with their wings spread to let them dry. They aren’t the most graceful fliers, either, and they don’t migrate nearly as far as many other birds.

Cormorants will nest either on the ground or in trees. Dad gathers the nesting material and brings it to Mom, who constructs the nest. You might think that your human baby poops a lot, but cormorants and their babies can make such big piles of excrement that they kill the host tree. When the trees die and fall down, stubborn cormorants will simply nest on the ground in the same place.

I saw this cormorant April 6 at Balboa Lake in Los Angeles. (You know you’re obsessed when the highlight of your family trip to Universal Studios is seeing a pair of Bell’s Vireos singing from their nest near a local reservoir, but that’s beside the point.) Double-crested Cormorants are also a common sight in Vancouver.

Violet-green Swallow

Spring has sprung, and the Violet-greens are back in town! Every summer I look forward to the return of the swallows, and just yesterday we noticed that my mother’s “pet” Violet-greens were back in the neighbourhood. They spend the winter cozy and warm in Mexico, and return to the western States and Canada to breed each summer. They are similar in appearance to Tree Swallows, which have also made recent returns to Metro Vancouver.

Violet-greens, like all swallows, eat only flying insects. They zoom around like tiny fighter jets to catch insects in flight, chirping away the whole time. They’re cavity nesters, so they need hollow trees, bird boxes, or holes in the siding of your house to make their nests. The baby swallows learn to jump before they learn to fly, and last summer we had a fledgling Violet-green hiding in our backyard for two days and two nights before he learned to fly. (During that time, I received hourly updates by email about “Baby Bert,” and our dog’s backyard off-lease privileges were revoked. Bert finally learned to fly when a hummingbird came down and showed him how.)

I saw this pair of Violet-greens at Iona Beach in Richmond on April 1.