April 30, 2026 - Mark Calcagni, Guest Birder
Guest Birder of the Day: Mark Calcagni and I frequented the same coffee shop 20-some years ago, and we reconnected the way people our age usually do, on Facebook, where I was obsessed with his bird photos while just getting into it myself. I'm glad I didn't know he had subscribed to the blog until recently or I would have been self-conscious about my mediocre pics. You are not allowed to appreciate the difference in photo quality here.
Spending sporadic parts of your formative years in Florida definitely skews your perception of birds. Having spent maybe a third of my life before the age of 25 in the Sunshine State, I can tell you, birds there aren’t secretive things. Florida is basically the “everyone gets a participation trophy” of birding. That’s not to lessen the excitement of seeing your first Roseate Spoonbill, or Snail Kite, or Wood Stork. All of those are wonderful, beautiful, worthy, and in the case of the Wood Stork, slightly unsettling, examples of Dinosaurs walking the earth. They’re just not that hard to find.
The truth is, in Florida, you get birded as often as you go birding. You have to wait for four-foot-tall Sandhill Cranes to cross the street, with their colts following close behind, while some nimrod in a 2005 Dodge Ram honks at you and flips you off as he turns left against the light. Ibises, that in Egypt are supposed to weigh your heart in judgement, instead weigh the number of 7-11 Slurpee cups floating in the ditch alongside SR 17/92. In a lot of places, particular birds are seen as transcendent in form, symbolism and purpose. They are dragged down to their most worldly, base nature in the fields and mangroves of central Florida.
When I moved to the Mountains of NE Georgia in my 30s, I noted the decided lack of avian critters in the ditch, aside from ubiquitous Turkey Vulture eating the 90th whitetail roadkill of the day. Birds didn’t really make themselves known, either passively or actively. I heard them, but they didn’t care if you existed tor not. The mountains introduced me to the idea that some birds DON'T care to be seen. At least not by you.
And that introduced me to the warblers: the dandies, the overly flamboyant. They know their audience, and you aren’t it. I saw them in Georgia, and later in North Carolina, but it took effort, early mornings, just a bit higher in the trees than i wanted to crick my neck to see. Black and White warblers, Pine Warblers, and the ubiquitous Yellow-rumped Warbler.
And then one day I saw this guy on a trail, and it felt like walking into CBGBs in 1979 and seeing Joey Ramone: pure Charisma with just a bit of awkwardness. It hit a sweet spot; not super high in the canopy where it’s guaranteed to be backlit, but not so low that it seemed it was begging for attention. The coloration, if you subtract it’s black hood, would put it in the “notable, but not exceptional” category; yellow, against olive green, against white. Classic. And then it gets broken by a black hood that looks like a gangster in a modern heist film. I was hooked.
The Hooded Warbler. Striking, elusive, yet accessible in the Eastern US through most of the spring and summer. Its range is growing, which by modern standards is a miracle. If its back is turned to you, you’ll likely ignore it, but once that yellow face comes around...
I like it so much I did a little charicature of it.
Mark has a very fun store with other cute bird designs. This is not a paid ad or placement, but I absolutely am open to selling out for money. Tell all the wealthy birdseed magnates you know.
