Golden-winged Warbler

 The golden-winged warbler is a colorful songbird that nests in the Eastern United States. They breed in tangles and shrubby habitats with a lot of cover. They nest on the ground usually using a plant to support the nest. The nest is typically made up of leaves, grasses, bark and other vegetation. The birds will often fly with food to fake nest sites to keep predators from locating the nest. They typically produce one brood per year. Once the youngsters fledge the family will typically move to a more mature forest habitat for the remainder of the summer then head down to Central and northern South America for the winter.

 The population of the Golden-winged warbler has been decreasing by roughly 8% per year for the last 45 years. Like many bird species habitat loss is one of the primary causes of their population decrease. In particular the loss of shrub-scrub habitat for breeding has had a devastating effect. Females are also very sensitive to human disturbance and may abandon the nest when there are people around. Finally the golden-winged has also been hybridizing with the similar blue-winged warbler creating two unique plumages, the Brewster's and Lawrence warblers. The golden-winged warbler is very important here in Minnesota because approximately half of the remaining world population nests in northern Minnesota. The top photo was taken during migration in the southern part of the state and the bottom was taken on breeding territory in northern Minnesota.

Golden-winged Warbler

The golden-winged warbler is a small wood warbler that nests in the north eastern half of the United States from Maine to Minnesota.They typically breed in bushy fields or marshes, building their nest low to the ground. They migrate to Central America and the northern portion of South America where they live in mixed flocks in the canopies of tropical forests over the winter. In Minnesota they usually only breed in the northern portions of the state. I photographed this bird while it was migrating north to its breeding territory in May.

Tuesday Tweets

2011 was a great year for photographing warblers. The winter lasted extra long so when the warblers came migrating through in May the trees had not leafed out yet. This made it easier to find and photograph small birds that normally hide in the foliage.
Two warblers made the 2012 calendar. The top photo was featured in August. It is a Wilson's warbler which I photographed at the Minnesota Valley NWR. The second bird was featured in May and it is a golden-winged warbler. It was also photographed at the Minnesota Valley NWR.

Welcome to Tuesday Tweets. To join in the fun, just post a photo of a bird on your blog then come here and enter your information in the inlinkz tool down below. Don't forget to put a link back to here on your blog and the pretty little banner photo. Then visit all of the sites that participate to see a lot of cool bird pics.

Tamarac NWR

At the Detroit Lakes Festival of Birds back in May I visited the Tamarac NWR several times. Since the refuge is only about 18 miles away from Detroit Lakes it was a great place to go and shoot pictures whenever I got a break during the festival. Besides that I also signed up to take a half day field trip to the refuge.

Tamarac was established back in 1938 as a breeding grounds for migrating birds. It consists of almost 43,000 acres of rolling forested hills mixed with lakes, rivers, bogs and swamps. It is named after the tamarac tree, a deciduous conifer that loses its needles each winter just like other deciduous trees loose their leaves.

The main reason that I choose to go to Tamarac for one of my field trips was to try and get a picture of a golden-winged warbler. Even though these birds breed quite extensively in northern Minnesota and Wisconsin I had never seen one before, but Tamarac is known to be one of the best places to see them and on the field trip I got my chance. Despite the gray overcast weather that morning we ventured into a portion of the park that was closed to normal visitors and that is where I got my first sighting, and pics, of a golden-winged warbler.

There were many other types of warblers around also. We spotted chestnut-sided, yellow warblers, American redstart, ovenbird, and Blackburnian warblers. I photographed this Blackburnian on the trails near the visitors center when I returned after the field trip instead of eating lunch.

We did also spot some birds other then warblers. This veery did not seem to care much about a bunch of people walking through the woods. It landed on the path a few feet away and began to walk around searching for food. It stayed on the ground in front of us for several minutes before he food something to eat and flew away with it.

Near the lakes and in some of the more marshy areas we found blue-winged teal, mallards, trumpeter swans, common loons, common yellow-throat and marsh wrens. I was able to snap a couple of shots of this marsh wren as he came to check out what was going on.

One of the things that makes Tamarac so cool is that it is right in the area where three major biomes converge. The coniferous forest stretches down from the north, the northern hardwood forests from the east and the tall grass prairie from the west. Due to the convergence of these different biomes there is a diversity of flora and fauna here that you do not find in many other places.

This includes a variety of different dragonflies. I was able to photograph quite a few new life dragons on this trip. The day that I arrived it was pretty slow on the dragon front with this American emerald the only dragonfly that I spotted that day. However by the time I left, two days later, several species had emerged and I was able to get pics of crimson-ringed whiteface, Hudsonian whiteface, belted whiteface, spiney baskettail and more.

There were also butterflies to photograph like this tiger swallowtail that I found near the visitors center. I was hoping that this was a Canadian tiger swallowtail, since I already have plenty of pictures of eastern tiger swallowtail, but I was never able to get a shot with its wings closed so I will never really know.