By Miles
One day in the fall of 2022, my dad and I saw an interesting piece of news about the Blackburnian Warbler. The article mentioned that a rare Blackburnian Warbler, which had been amusingly translated into Chinese, was discovered on an island in England. Birders were renting boats and waiting overnight just to take a look at it. Since then, the Chinese translation of Blackburnian Warbler has become a frequently mentioned and amusing term in my family.
Last Friday, a Blackburnian Warbler was also discovered in a public library in the city of West Covina, LA!
On Saturday, we arrived at the library and met a birder who had just seen it and pointed out the tree where he had observed the bird. However, we and several other birders tried for nearly two hours in the afternoon and couldn’t even hear the sound of it. As the sun set, we had to head back home.
The next morning (today), just as we were preparing to visit Bear Divide, we saw a message from someone saying he had just re-found the Blackburnian Warbler. So, we decided to go there instead.
By the time we arrived, lots of birders who had received the message were already there searching for it. After a couple of minutes, a birder waved her hand, and everyone ran toward the flower trees next to her, where she had just spotted the Blackburnian Warbler. But when we rushed there, no one could find it again. Suddenly, someone found it landing on the ground, but it disappeared into the bushes just as everyone arrived.
After several times of finding it at different places near the tree and disappearing in a second, we finally got a good look at it as it landed on a branch near the pathway leading to higher ground. But the place was hard to take a photo of and had some branches blocking the view. Then, it flew into some trees and bushes, and could not be found again. We waited a few minutes and saw it chasing a Yellow-rumped Warbler (or being chased by a Yellow-rumped Warbler) back to the flower tree and then flying west.
We soon found the Blackburnian Warbler on the ground right in front of the library entrance, but it kept hiding in the bushes, and couldn’t be easily photographed. Then, it suddenly flew over my head to a tree and flew to an open area near the wall. It was so amazing! With the bright yellow breast and orange throat, it’s so beautiful! We finally got it! After several wonderful minutes photographing it wandering around the ground near the entrance, it flew into a tree and finally flew back to the far west side.
The Blackburnian Warbler is a medium-small-sized passerine, a little smaller than a Yellow-rumped Warbler, with a typical warbler shape. It has a small patch of black in front of its eyes, with yellow below. Its throat is an amazing bright orange. Its crown, lores, eyelines, and subauricular stripes are black, while its supercilium and nape are yellow. Its upper breast is orangish-yellow and its belly is white. Its flanks are white with short black stripes. It has two white wingbars and except from them, its back, wing, and tail are all greyish-black with a few white spots and stripes. They are usually in the upper regions of coniferous forests in the eastern part of North America feeding on insects and other bugs, but this one kind of got lost and flew to this library in southern California and is frequently feeding on the ground.
This is my legend of the Blackburnian Warbler.
Here is the eBird checklist of the day: https://ebird.org/checklist/S220298506
