warblers

September 6, 2026

Sara Kate Wilkinson

Sara Kate Wilkinson

— 5 min read
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September 6, 2026
Bird of the Day: American redstart, autumn warbler. Hope she's the first of many.

Where: Huntley Meadows Park

When: 7:10 am

Bird Species: American robin, Carolina wren, mourning dove, red-bellied woodpecker, eastern bluebird, barn swallow, American redstart, great blue heron, lesser yellowlegs, eastern phoebe, osprey, great egret, red-headed woodpecker, downy woodpecker, gray catbird, white-breasted nuthatch, northern cardinal. ruby-throated hummingbird, American goldfinch, tufted titmouse, Carolina chickadee

Things I Thought About:

  • My knees and hips are punishing me for my deep squat hubris of yesterday. They're right to do it. Keeps me humble.
  • We had heavy rains all week, and there are downed and collapsing trees everywhere. The foliage is very beaten down, setting up new sight lines for the fall. I see this new pile of cut brush from where they had to clear a tree off the trail and my first thought is how much the white-throated sparrows will love this spot when they get back.
The bird of the day is spider.
  • Swallows are still staging in the trees on the edge of the woods, but the gnatcatchers are gone this week. This is why it’s such a stagnant time of year; the exodus has started but the winter residents are back yet, and I routinely miss the fall warblers every year.
I don't know why I love the look of this so much. They look like ornaments on a bare Christmas tree.
  • What if an OTC allergy medicine worked, like, at all? What if my nose wasn’t running for a second? Science fiction.
  • The beaches that had sprung up this month have vanished, and with them the killdeer and sandpipers. There are four yellowlegs hanging on, but I’m ready for these ponds to fill up so my ducks come back.
Hugely zoomed and cropped, he was a long way away.
  • I need a harness style strap for my camera; the neck strap is a little uncomfortable. What is that leather sort of harness that Daisy Edgar-Jones wears in Twisters? A confounding piece of wardrobe; I have no idea how you'd actually get the camera up to your eye, but it looks badass.
  • They’re awfully cute but I’ll be pretty pleased when tree frog season is over. People kneel down and line up and just really clutter the boardwalk taking photos of them. It’s fun to point them out to little kids, though.
One of literally dozens of green tree frogs spotted today. The bird of the day is frog.
  • The osprey is out looking for a fish, and I stand and wait with other osprey enthusiasts for a long time. We all inhale sharply and then "awww" in disappointment as he makes a sudden descent but then does not dive. We are all sharing our favorite osprey spots, and favorite osprey facts, they can rotate one of their three front toes backward to get a better grip, did you know the oldest known osprey lived in Virginia? (I did not. Banded in 1973 and found in 1998.) A truly wonderful community experience. He landed in a tree for a period of time, and then came out hunting again, but seemed no closer to making a dive. Stay alert, I tell my osprey pals, because I'm about to leave so he's certain to dive about 30 yards in front of you. I encounter one of them later in the parking lot and she tells me he just went back to the tree. What a tease.
Osprey only eat fish, nothing else, so you can see why being able to move that toe around so there are two forward and two backward, like a clamp, would be so important an adaptation.
  • I go off trail to pee in my usual spot, and I guess I leave my field glasses back there, but when I go back to find them, I can't. I make the whole entire park loop twice. My ankles and knees hate me.
  • Then again, I've been looking for an excuse to buy a better pair of binos. Every cloud a silver lining.
  • Oh, what a pretty little phoebe. The velvety chocolate brown and lemon-yellow look so nice together.
Lately I've been struggling with differentiating a phoebe from a pewee, but this one was clear to me, that big Disney brown eye and soft yellow was on the belly is distinctive. They only get that wash late in the summer, though. Again, a long distance and a very severe crop on this photo.
  • Is today the day I clean my house? Outlook hazy. Couch nap seems in order after this.
  • What if I go to REI and drop like 500 bucks tomorrow? What if a company sponsored my baby blog and bought me a good pair of binos and hiking shoes?
  • What if later today someone gave me a foot rub and 85,000 dollars?

BOTD: American redstart, female. A warbler! My first of the fall. I have historically had no luck at all in the fall migration, so I was delighted to have seen this lady. I thought for a moment that it could have been a lady goldfinch, but once I saw that those were yellow blazes and not just an all over wash, I was thrilled. Male redstarts are a beautiful and vibrant orange and black, while the female is this olive color with yellow patches rather than orange. They are long distance migrants. These guys are headed to the Greater Antilles, or northern South America.

She was truly buried deep when I first saw her, which is why I wondered if it wasn't another goldfinch. It was pretty exciting to confirm that this was my first fall warbler of 2026.

She was in deep foliage, and the morning sun was not especially high yet, so I was pretty pleased to have spotted her at all, never mind to get clear photos for ID. Seeing this bird really drives home the fact that the world is turning.

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