BTHE CAMERA AND THE BUTTER- BUTT BUGBEAR

So I’m going to blame the yellow-rumps. They’ve been too quick moving, too deep in the bushes or too high in the trees. Or they only come out into the open in the worst backlit light, or just as the battery dies on my camera. Or as the person walking their dog and talking on their phone comes down the path behind me. I don’t know the exact biological mechanisms for how they go about conspiring against me, but I have no doubt that they, collectively, have done me wrong. It’s the only explanation for how many of them have been around and how few of them have given me a decent pose.

Kevin Christman was expressing similar sentiments about yellow-rumps a few weeks ago, but then he caught some decent frames of them coming into his bird bath. (Which is fine, if you can overlook the fact that feeder and bird bath photos are cheating.)

Why are there so many yellow-rumps in the Keys this winter, as opposed to other winters?

Most of the bird species we get here in winter are obligate migrants, meaning as a species they tend to completely abandon their breeding grounds. It’s thought this is generally motivated by a hormonal change triggered by a shifting photoperiod, a.k.a. length of day. Basically, obligate migrants migrate out of genetic habit.

Yellow-rumped warblers are considered facultative migrants, meaning they only migrate in response to environmental conditions, most often food scarcity. And they generally don’t migrate as a species, but as individuals. It just seems that this year, something drove a lot of them to make the same decision.

Seeing so many, even if I was failing at photographing them, I started to get the urge to parse them beyond species, maybe down to age and gender.

The Sibley Field Guide to Birds rarely lets me down, but on this occasion it did. Of the 15 images on the yellow-rumped warbler page, none of them depict adult yellow-rumps in winter plumage, or how they look for the half a year they spend in Florida. I blame this on a northern bias in the content. Also on the lack of space on a page. It did note in the small print text that winter birds have an “overall brownish color.”

In order to find a good, systematic understanding of what the various types of yellowrumped warblers looked like in their winter plumage, I ended up going to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s Birds of the World website (subscription-based), which had good clear images of all the aforementioned variations. And I did come away with one further bit of clarity – that I am probably never going to be good at parsing gender, age, or Audubon’s vs. Myrtle in the field. Or at least not any time soon.

I’d kind of taken a break from going out to try and get a good shot of them, too. But when I was up on the mainland a few weeks ago, I made a stop at Audubon’s Corkscrew Swamp Sanctuary, because I hadn’t been there for a while, and because it was one of the first places I fell in love with this whole birdwatching thing.

I can’t say it was a great day for birds up there, but it’s never bad. I saw some painted buntings and some pileated woodpeckers, as well as a few alligators and the rear end of a swimming otter. And there were yellow-rumps everywhere. Mostly they were high up in the canopy. But then I started noticing a few of them flitting around down low, around the cypress knees, and I managed to lift my camera and get a few decent shots of them in focus and in frame.

I’m going to keep trying to get a decent shot of a yellow-rump in the Keys, but catching those few frames was a nice way to give that itch a little scratch.

By: Tracy and Sean McDonald

The Scoreboard Gabriela Aguero

This Week In Keys Sports

Sophomore, Key West Tennis

In four matches this season, Key West’s Gabriela Aguero remains undefeated against both Marathon and Coral Shores, making her the undeniable Queen of the Keys Courts. In addition to her unblemished record, Aguero has won the admiration of her teammates and coach, Elliot Manton.

“Gabriela works hard to improve her skill set,” said Manton. “She is always working for ways to have an advantage over her opponent.”

The sophomore sensation is also half of the Conchs’ top doubles team which has chalked up victories Keys-wide. For her drive to be her best, sportsmanship and oncourt savvy, Gabriela Aguero is this week’s Keys Weekly Athlete of the Week.

By: Tracy and Sean McDonald