A yellow-throated, blue-winged, white-bellied, chestnut-sided extravaganza

02:08 PM EDT on Wednesday, May 11, 2005

BY GERALD M. CARBONE
Journal Staff Writer

CHARLESTOWN -- We stalked the wild warblers, not to harm them, just to see them as they flit through Rhode Island on their annual spring migration. Mid-May is the peak of warbler season here, and though the season got off to a slow start, that all changed yesterday.

Anticipation hung in the air as two dozen people followed Mary Jo Murray into the woods on her free weekly bird walk. She brought her group to the Ninigret Park picnic area, then walked them slowly along a dirt road to the Audubon Society's Kimball Wildlife Refuge.

"A bit warmer," said Murray, who retired from teaching elementary school in upstate New York 26 years ago. She dressed sensibly in a broad-brimmed hat, wraparound sun glasses, dark wind breaker, and hiking boots. She wore hearing aids in both ears, the better to hear and identify bird calls.

And there were lots of bird calls competing for her attention: the mournful hoot of the dove, the blue jay's two-note screech, and the dominant raspy song of the chipping sparrow.

"A bit warmer," Murray repeated. "Our best day so far."

Through the cacophony of bird songs someone heard something different. Then Murray spotted it: a blue gray gnat catcher calling with what The National Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Birds calls its "distinctive pzzz."

A good aspect of birding in a group of 24 is that with all those eyes, not much will be missed. Someone saw the first warbler of the day -- a tiny, zebra-striped bird creeping up the trunk of an oak. The bird was backlighted by sun giving all a good view.

Journal photo / Bob Breidenbach

From left, Sandy Saunders, of East Greenwich, Nancy Clayton, of Exeter, and Dorothy Wadlow, of Stonington, Conn., watch the wild warblers in the woods of Charlestown yesterday. Mid-May is the peak of warbler season.

This little four-inch bird wintered no farther north than the Gulf Coast; now it was passing through, perhaps to fly as far north as Newfoundland. As its name implies, the black-and-white is dull colored. Most warblers are bright little birds, little jewels flashing color.

The Field Guide lists 33 types of warblers, most of which push through Rhode Island: the blue-winged and the organ-crowned, the chestnut-sided and the yellow-rumped. They fly through city parks as well as country woodlands; Swan Point Cemetery in Providence is a warbler haven.

The group milled about in the picnic area next to Burlingame Lake until the chipping sparrows became an annoyance, drowning out the other birds' song.

Just as they began to walk down the dirt road to the woods of Kimball, a yellow warbler perched on a branch in full view. It was the hue of yellow Play-Doh, with a chest full of rust-colored streaks.

The road to Kimball was lined with hardwoods in bud: red maples, oaks with flowering leaves of gold, and trees with variegated shades of green.

"There's a peeper!" someone called as the group passed a swamp. "Spring peeper."

Along the road, we passed another black-and-white warbler.

"This day is wonderful," said Mary Keane to her friend, Martha Parks.

"Isn't it?" Parks said.

Linda Gardrel called out: "Cow birds!"

"They don't count," said Dave Monk. Birders don't like the brown-headed cow birds for their habit of laying their eggs in the nests of prettier song birds. The other birds tend to the nest; when the eggs hatch the cow bird hatchlings grow quicker and use their size to starve or boot from the nest the real mother's babies.

Dave Monk of Charlestown hears a prairie warbler, a pretty bird of yellow and black, but it's quite a ways back in the woods and cannot be seen.

"Next two weeks is prime time for watching warblers," he said. "In the month of June you get some migrants, but around May 15 is peak of the season."

Monk was interrupted by a beautiful oriole, not bashful at all. He sat on an overhanging branch, his chest blazed orange in the sun. He snapped his beak.

"Oh, he's a bug-eater too," said someone in the group.

"Most everyone is at this time of the year." The seed eaters come later.

"Oh, you'll get a beautiful girlfriend."

"I got a cardinal." Sure enough, a male cardinal in full breeding plumage of red, flits past.

"There's a gray-crested fly catcher."

Mary Keane said, "That squeaky noise is the black-and-white [warbler.] The squeaky wheel."

"That's a white-breasted nut hatch," said Dorothy Wadlow, who came from Stonington for the walk, the only non-Rhode Islander. "And he has a nut, too."

The road ended in a small field where the trails of the Kimball Refuge began. Murray, who had driven down, waited for her group. "It's really warming up," she said.

Bumblebees hummed in an azalea bush.

Gerry Matteo, a serious birder who wears a ball cap with bird tracks on it, saw it first: a ruby-throated humming bird in a bare tree above the azalea. Monk said that 99 percent of the time a humming bird in Rhode Island is a ruby throated, though Matteo once saw a rufous humming bird at her backyard feeder.

From the field the group pushed deeper into the woods of Kimball; here, the birding got really good.

Wadlow, the Stonington woman, said that she read in Newsweek an article about things to do to make you live longer. Birding was on the list. "You use your eyes, your ears, your memory," she said. "It gets you outside, walking."

Matteo said, "Not walking walking but . . ." more of a stroll. She often joins Murray on the weekly walk, but till yesterday, this year had been a bust.

"We've had days of one or two birds and little sound," Matteo said. "This is the best day so far. I kept wondering whether we'd have spring. It's finally a decent birding day."

Monk reported that he had just seen an American red start, a type of warbler, on a side trail. Then a yellow-throated vireo -- a bird the Field Guide describes as "a handsome vireo" whose "number have decreased in recent years" perched directly above the heads of the group.

"A good morning, Mary Jo," said Keane.

And it got better: a flock of yellow-rumped warblers appeared, briefly. Part of the group joined Murray on a successful quest to see Monk's American red start, while the rest of the group that lingered to see the yellow rumps were treated to the sight of a wood thrush, a bashful bird that's hard to spot. Henry David Thoreau wrote of the wood thrush: "Whenever a man hears it, he is young, and Nature is in her spring; wherever he hears it, it is a new world and a free country, and the gates of heaven are not shut against him."

We heard the wood thrush's call filter through the colored mosaic of red and gold and green buds yesterday, in the woods of Charlestown. After a long winter, Nature was finally in her spring.

Mary Jo Murray's weekly bird walks leave from the Charlestown Mini-Mart every Tuesday at 8 a.m., except for the months of June and July.