If you want ornithological culture shock, spend a day birding on the Coastal Plain, enjoying classic southern specialties like chuck-will’s-widow, red-cockaded woodpecker and brown-headed nuthatch in the open, sandy pine forests, and then drive three-plus hours west to the mountains along the West Virginia border.
This week it was in the low 40s as we stepped out of our van into the Blue Grass Valley in gorgeous Highland County. Within minutes we were enjoying the sight of a male golden-winged warbler as it sang between forays into a flowering shrub for tiny caterpillars. Female warblers have not yet migrated back to these chilly mountains, letting the males have a week to sort things out first. We searched the skies all morning for golden eagles, as there is a small Canadian maritime-breeding population that spends the winter here, with some lingering into spring and summer. No luck, but we rewarded with six different broad-winged hawk sightings.
Following gravel roads that thread the state border, we came upon a hotspot of territorial warblers, magnolia, blackburnian, black-throated blue, black-and-white, and black-throated green, some of the handsomest birds of North America, curiously inspecting us as they sang. The well-maintained gravel roads are narrow and steep, but there was absolutely no traffic, which was lucky because we had to park in the middle of the road.
The black-capped chickadees in these mountains are a separate species from the Carolina chickadees so familiar to birders in the rest of the state, although one needs to hear the song for the differences to be obvious. A pair of rose-breasted grosbeaks was building an awkward nest of twigs, something not observed on the coastal lowlands, where the species is known only as a migrant. There were radiant scarlet tanagers at every stop, hundreds over the course of the day, and the not-yet-leafed-out trees made for unbelievably views.
We worked our way south to Bath County, and were rewarded with long looks at the rarely seen mourning warbler. This bird is more common far to the north, but the relics of high elevation forest in Virginia support a tiny population. Other northern-nesting species, such as alder flycather and yellow-rumped warbler also occur here. These eluded us, but we did find a northern waterthrush and yellow-bellied sapsuckers, which make their southernmost stand here in Virginia’s mountains, reminders of our recent geologic history as a refuge during the last glaciation. On a separate trip, last week, we enjoyed nesting red-breasted nuthatches and red crossbills, birds found on the Coastal Plain only occasionally, and never as breeders.
As we returned home, we spotted an unexpected flock of 60 exhausted short-billed dowitchers on the shore of a high mountain lake. These sandpipers, resting on their way to the Arctic, would have been right at home on a mudflat in the Coastal Plain. Their awkward presence on the mossy boulders underscored how different the western part of the state is from the east, and just how lucky Virginia birders are to have so much avian diversity close to home.
Cristol teaches in the Biology Department at the College of William and Mary. Email him at dacris@wm.edu. To discover local birding opportunities visit williamsburgbirdclub.org.
