Little Feats - Migratory Songbirds Travel Incredible Distances

For the past couple of weeks, the daily East Bay Birding Digest has been packed with joyous notes about “FOS” (first of season) sightings and the songs of neotropical migrants.* While hooded mergansers and most of the other overwintering birds of our creeks and ponds have headed north, songbirds in great numbers have been arriving from the south.

Ash-throated flycatchers, black-headed grosbeaks, Bullock’s and hooded orioles, orange-crowned and Wilson’s warblers, western kingbirds, western tanagers…if this list sounds like the obscure ramblings of a nerdy birdwatcher, take a look at the photos. Many of these birds are gorgeous, and whether or not you are fully conscious of them, their songs are livening up your spring.** It takes some patient sitting, watching, and listening to get to know them, but it’s worth it.

Let’s not think of migrating songbirds as mere trinkets, though. To begin with, imagine a bird that weighs no more than a couple of spoonfuls of salt flying all the way to Central America. That’s about three thousand miles, longer than a trip from San Francisco to New York. Granted, they don’t do it all in one flight. Researchers have recently been able to track their routes with geo-locators and learned that they can cover more than three hundred miles in a day—about the distance, as the crow flies, from San Francisco to Los Angeles. Try walking that in a day.

The apparent record holder for songbird migration is the northern wheatear, a bird we do not see in California, which flies from Alaska and other far North American parts to sub-Saharan Africa—more than eighteen thousand miles.

Why do they do it? Insects and blooming plants make for abundant food once spring and summer come to the north, and good nesting spots are another reason. But only half of the songbirds that migrate survive their journeys. Besides the weather, they have their own metabolisms to deal with. They need to replenish their fat reserves as they travel, and that’s yet another good argument for retaining large, uninterrupted expanses of open space.

Here at home, a sure sign the migration is on is when my friend Judy shows up with photos of orioles on her iPhone. Both Bullock’s and hooded orioles will visit hummingbird feeders. I think that’s a hooded oriole in the photo.

Bullock’s orioles like oak woodlands and riparian settings, but they also will settle into established suburban neighborhoods. I was interested to read that they love horse hair for a nesting material—maybe the Alhambra Valley horse country is a good place to find them. Hooded orioles, on the other hand, love populated areas. They nest in California fan palms but will settle for Canary Island date palms and Mexican fan palms, so a stroll around Granger’s Wharf and out Alhambra Avenue to that row of palms by the county hospital might be in order soon.

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*Neotropical migrant birds breed in North America in spring and early summer, and fly to Mexico, the Caribbean, and Central and South America for the winter.

**The best word I found in 2011 was “eumoirous,” in Birds of California (1923) by William Leon Dawson, who applied it to the song of the black-headed grosbeak. According to the Dictionary of Difficult Words, it means “happy because innocent and good.”