Ruthven banding station yellow warbler mystery

This blog is going to be short and sweet sweet sweeter than sweet!!!! For those with a good bird ear they will get the bird joke . Sweet sweeter than sweet is the phonetic  clue reminding birders of the call of the yellow warbler. It has been mentioned to me more than once that if one has to explain the joke it really isn't that funny.  So here  is the deal. When I was down at Ruthven Park banding station Rick ludkin explained to us that in the fall it is almost impossible to catch a yellow warbler. Ruthven has many breeding pairs on their beautiful property but once they leave they do not catch any of the northern breeders and their migrating young ones. Rick prompted me to look at our stats  which I just did moments ago only to discover that we banded  29 in August and another 14 in September. Our last yellow warbler was banded September 25th which is extremely late for a yellow warbler. These birds have to go  south and yet they do not seem to be going  near Ruthven.  A definite curiosity to be pondered and hopefully one day solved . Perhaps that will be studies by a Ruthven "bagger" some  year hence.

           Now last year may have been an anomaly for us as usually yellow warblers are one the first warblers to move, but I checked our spring stats and there were 8  springs that we did not catch as many yellows as we did this fall.  One has to wonder if the bird we caught on the 25th  nested in Cochrane or perhaps even as far north as Mooseonee.  Such are the things  that I like to consider when there is still three feet of snow  and the yellow warblers are still 6 weeks away basking under a tropical sun.Putting on enough fat to make the perilous journey north just in time for black flies and mosquitoes to emerge  to feed their young ones. Allowing them time to fatten up for their journey south and perhaps just perhaps to find their way into a net put up by one of the Ruthven baggers. They will bring the bird into the lab gingerly and Rick will take it out of the bag and smile. Next he will tell everyone about how he saw yellow warblers in Costa Rica this past march in flocks of over 100 as they were getting ready to start their migration. Yellow warblers , sweet,  sweet, sweeter than sweet !!