Greetings All:
I spent the morning birding, with Abbie Ince, the Lubbock Cemetery and the
riparian area immediately below Lake Six. Yellow-rumped Warblers were
everywhere - forty plus at the cemetery and thirty plus below Lake Six.
Orange-crowned Warblers were about - four in the cemetery and two below the
lake. The typical atypical was present - a female Common Yellowthroat
below the lake. I finally got a photograph, albeit a cruddy photograph, of
the continuing Pine Warbler at the cemetery.
That's about as good as it gets in Lubbock this late in the year - the two
typicals, the stray yellowthroat, the casual pine - we are at 100%,
warbler-wise, for Lubbock in December.
Then, thanks entirely to Abbie, things get interesting! Shortly after
popping up our first Winter Wren (of three) below the lake, she said
something along the lines of 'there's a parula'. I asked something along
the lines of 'seen or heard' and she replied 'heard'. I foolishly tried to
talk her out of it but she has spent a lot of time in College Station, is
quite familiar with the noises of the Northern Parula, and stuck to her
guns. Then she saw it! Then I saw it!! Then we spent twenty minutes
chasing the bugger, hoping for photographs, before it disappeared, with a
horde of Yellow-rumped Warblers, in the direction of the cemetery. During
that period, Abbie heard the bird several more times and I saw it three
more times - once in flight and twice as it flitted through high foliage.
Abbie felt that the bird was not singing full song but was singing
recognizably Northern Parula song. Her description was along the lines of
zid-d, zid-d, zid-d, upward buzz - which sounds, to me, like a good
description of the majority of one of the species' more common songs.
Regrettably, given my hearing loss, I did not hear the bird.
We both got good looks at the perched bird (Abbied quite close with bare
eyes, me at a greater distance through binoculars) - bluish wings with
white wingbars, bluish head with white crescents above and below the eye,
bright yellow throat and breast, white belly. Thanks to the binoculars, I
was able to make out a partial red band almost crossing the breast with
yellow throat above and some yellow breast below. Going by the Peterson
Field Guide to Wablers, I would make this a first winter male. In flight,
the bird was mostly blue with white windows towards the tips of the outer
tail feathers. I did not see the greenish patch in the mantle but could
easily have overlooked that as the bird flew away.
This record is nicely bracketed by Lubbock two other 'winter' records for
Northern Parula: a single bird at the same location on 30 November 2000 and
a single bird at Aztlan Park from 23-31 December 2003.
It will be interesting to see if this bird can be relocated and remains
through the upcoming CBC - along with the Pine Warbler - as it has been a
long time since the Lubbock County CBC pulled FIVE species of warbler.
Anthony 'Fat Tony' Hewetson
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