Little Woods Birds

     This morning, I stopped for about an hour in a deciduous woodland of maturing trees in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania to enjoy whatever of nature came my way.  I soon noticed that small birds were seemingly everywhere in that woods, in the tree tops and middle layer, and on the forest floor.  But they seldom were still for long, making it tough to identify them.  Therefore, it was all the more exciting when I was able to identify some of those little birds.  And as I would have expected, some of those species of birds were residents of the woods, while other kinds were migrants.
     Several each of Carolina chickadees and tufted titmice were the first couple of species I was able to identify.  These mostly-gray, woodland species are permanent residents locally.  Both species were engaged in food-gathering while I was there, with some of the titmice foraging on the ground.  And when I looked at the titmice with my 16 power binoculars, it seemed that they were storing seeds and other bits of food under the fallen leaves, presumably to eat during the coming winter.  Not having seen that behavior before, I looked it up on the web, and, sure enough, there was reference to that storing behavior in tufted titmice, as with nuthatches, woodpeckers and blue jays.  That exciting tidbit of information was new to me.  That behavior, no doubt, saves bird lives.
     There were other kinds of birds in those woods, including a few resident blue jays in the trees, and a gray catbird in a thicket; a catbird that didn't yet go south.  A resident white-breasted nuthatch walked down a tree trunk head-first while looking for invertebrates and their eggs in crevices in the bark, and a resident downy woodpecker and resident red-bellied woodpecker pecked into dead wood of standing trees after invertebrates in the wood. 
     The jays were actively gathering acorns from oak trees and flying away with them to hide those nuts in tree cavities or little holes they dig into the soil.  The jays, as they always are in their blue, black and white feathering, were beautiful as they repeatedly flew into and out of the oak trees. 
     The whole while I was seeing and identifying year-around birds in the woods, I was suspecting some of the birds in the trees were types of warblers and other kinds of small, migrating birds.  At first I only saw locally living birds.  But then I caught a glimpse of a small bird with a yellow head. Looking at it with binoculars, I saw it was a black-throated green warbler, a species that nests in the mixed coniferous/deciduous forests of Canada and the northeastern United States and was passing through here on migration.  This striking bird, probably an adult male, had a dull-green back and a black throat.
     Then I saw a beautiful male black-throated blue warbler halfway up a tree.  This lovely, migrant bird had a blue-gray back, white belly and black flanks and throat.  This species, too, breeds in mixed forests of Canada and the northeastern United States.
     But the third kind of warbler I identified, my favorite bird of the day, was a black and white warbler that had alternate black and white stripes all over.  This warbler, as does all its kin, walked up-side-sown on tree trunks and limbs, as a nuthatch does, as it looked for invertebrate food in cracks in the bark.  This species nests on the fallen-leaf floors of deciduous forests in the eastern Untied States and southeastern Canada.   
     Black-throated green and black and white warblers spend the time of the northern winter in the comparative warmth of Mexico, the Caribbean, Central America and very northern South America.  Black-throated blues winter in parts of Central America. 
     Warblers as a family of birds probably originated in Central America.  Some species of them go north to raise young in less crowded forests, but return to their origin for the winter.  
     Look for birds wherever you may be, whenever you can.  They are always interesting and beautiful, and we always learn something new about them.