Hi everyone and welcome back to our bird series! It will be every Wednesday until I run out of bird pictures, which probably won't take too long since I used most of them already in our first series. Anyway, today's bird is the "Blackburnian Warbler". The picture is of the female, gathering nesting material on the ground, the male is orange instead of yellow and is more black and white otherwise. They prefer mature forests of white and black spruce, balsam fir, and white pine in this area. In it's southern most breeding range it will pick deciduous trees for nesting. They spend most of their time in the tops of these trees and are therefore hard to see except during migration times when they will spend time lower with other warblers and also with flocks of chickadees. They spend their winters in South America, so for a tiny bird they are strong fliers. These birds are smaller than chickadees. They eat large quantities of caterpillars, including spruce budworm. They also eat spiders, flies, mayflies, ants, scale insects, aphids and many others. Their nests are high in a coniferous tree near the end of a branch, up to 80 feet high. Females build the nest of twigs, grasses and spider silk. The nest is about 3 inches (7.5cm) wide and not quite 2 inches (4.5cm) deep. Three to five eggs are common. Both parents feed the nestlings and fledglings. The oldest recorded Blackburnian warbler was 8 years and 2 months old, found during a banding operation, and was released again. Have a great day everyone and God bless!

Steve and Muffin.

©2021 Steve McLeod.