I’m hesitant to bring friends birding with me. If you’re not that into birds, it’s incredibly boring (having spent the majority of my life in that unique position of having no choice but to join my dad on birding expeditions despite my being “not that into birds,” I can attest). I never believed that I would inculcate my dad’s immense patience. Hours turning to days spent scoping the shoreline for a single great black-tailed gull disguised against tens of thousand of California gulls (a process I have sat through) may remain beyond my tolerance, but as my appreciation for birds has increased, so has the length of time I am willing to spend standing in silence, binoculars in hand. 

This was the position I found myself in today, after having followed a house wren into a thicket of holly and juniper. The wren spirited off in some different direction (which could basically be considered a different dimension for how good a chance I had of relocating it), but this was migration season and the rustle of displaced leaves far above confirmed my suspicions that the canopy was deceptively active. As most songbirds migrate by night, using the stars for navigation, dense canopies in greenbelts such as the one in which I had wandered are often thick with resting migrant birds in the daytime.

I was hoping for warblers, flighty little songbirds that winter along the equator and bring their cheery tropical plumage with them as they cross the US for higher latitudes come spring. While I managed a quick glimpse at what I think was a northern parula, I lost the little guy the moment I reached for my binoculars, par for the course. After fifteen minutes, my neck craned beneath the grove holly, I was greeted by a bird I had failed to consider: a ruby-crowned kinglet! 

These petite (averaging four inches from bill to tail tip and weighing a quarter of an ounce²), olive-colored birds are not the most striking at first glance, nor will they earn you many points for rareness as they can be found across the southern United States and as far north as coastal New England year-round³ (for the record, where I grew up in Seattle, ruby-crowned kinglets were a breeding-season-only find), but there’s something undeniably charming about them. For a good five minutes I watched the little guy bob from branch to branch, pausing to sing a few high tsee notes. I’ve always regarded tiny songbirds, be they chickadees or bush tits or ruby-crowned kinglets, with a bit of incredulity—what could this little guy be thinking, how does he interpret this expansive world as he cocks his head and blinks his black seed-bead eyes? Evidently, this one was thinking about potential mates, as he followed his song by flashing a theretofore obscured mohawk of crimson feathers. A plenty-sufficient reward for my patience, in my opinion. 

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Works Cited

1. American Ornithological Society. (2021, June 29). In with the Old, Out with the Mew: Update to the Check-list of North American Birds Publishes Today in Ornithology. AOS Wingbeat. https://americanornithology.org/in-with-the-old-out-with-the-mew-2021-checklist-update/.
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2. Pfeiffer, B. (2017, April 17). Behold the Male Ruby-crowned Kinglet in All Its Mating Majesty. Audubon BirdNote. https://www.audubon.org/news/behold-male-ruby-crowned-kinglet-all-its-mating-majesty ↩︎
3. Sibley, D. A. (2016, March 29). The Sibley Field Guide to Birds of Western North America: Second Edition. New York : Alfred A Knopf. ↩︎