Bird of the Week 5/5 - 5/9

it's warbler time

Apparently, this is my 200th BOTW (on Substack, at least). Which is pretty crazy! So I thought I would celebrate with a fan favorite:

This week’s bird is the: Blackburnian Warbler

photo cred

1. Ooh, ahh. What a handsome guy. Blackburnian Warblers have a legendary status among birders. It all comes down to looks. There are a lot of yellow warblers out there (including the Yellow Warbler), but very few warblers with any orange.

2. Blackburnian Warblers inhabit eastern boreal forests, as well as much of the Appalachian mountain range. They overlap with quite a few other very similar warbler species in those areas.

3. Blackburnian Warblers eat the same invertebrate species as their warbler cousins in the same areas. Some early ecologists thought that species that competed for the same food resources would inevitably compete one another out of existence, leading to the extinction of all but the most dominant species.

4. But (now classic) work in the 1950s showed that, in order to avoid competing, these warbler species exhibit “niche partitioning” – meaning they differentiate where they forage in the tree canopy (see pic below). This leads to the preservation of biodiversity across evolutionary time.

5. Although early work suggested that foraging in different areas led different species to specialize on different insect species, very recent research shows this isn’t really the case. All these species tend to eat the same wide range of insects, but they do vary slightly in how they catch them.

photo cred

You can read more about the original research on these warblers here, and more recent research here.

Have a great week!