Sitka Nature

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Yellow Warbler Singing

Recently I have been asking people if they have seen any Yellow Warblers this spring. While not an especially common species along the road system in Sitka (mostly due to lack of preferred habitat, I suspect), in many years they are show up around the first week of May. However, this year there I had heard of no reports, so I was curious if there were any around.

Early this morning I went for a walk around the neighborhood and heard a bird singing. I thought it might be a Yellow Warbler, though I am not so familiar with their song that I easily remember it, especially the first time I hear it each spring. The bird was moving around in a dense salmonberry thicket. From time to time I could see movement through the branches and leaves, but I was not able to get a good look. Eventually I was able to get the photo above in the brief moment it was partially visible through the leaves. Until I was able to look at the picture more closely, I wasn’t confident that it was a Yellow Wabler, but the look of its face and the streaks on its breast clinched it for me.

Paul Norwood and his brother Julien (visiting from Paris) found this Northern Wheatear last night (3 May) below O’Connell Bridge on the Japonski side. In addition to the features seen in the photos, Paul mentioned the pale flashing rump was also quite distinctive.

The bird was also observed last night by Kitty LaBounty and Lucy Pizzuto-Phillips. I was unable to find the bird in the area when I looked this morning (4 May).

This is a first report of this species for Sitka. The checklist of birds for Southeast Alaska indicates this species is Accidental in Spring and Very Rare in Fall for this region. Kessel and Gibson’s 1978 Status and Distribution of Alaska Birds lists only a handful of Fall records, 2 from the 1800s and 3 from 1966 and 1967.

(click on the images below for larger versions)

Thanks to Paul and Julien Norwood for the report and photos, and Steve Heinl for information regarding their prior occurence in Southeast Alaska.

• Shorebirds@Totem Park including 2 FOS Marbled Godwits. #

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Over the past couple of years the sun has been in a solar minimum, a consequence of which has been auroras that are only rarely strong enough to be seen from Sitka. Combined with frequently cloudy skies, the northern lights have not been easy to observer around here for quite a while. A couple of days ago, I noticed the aurora forecast from the UAF Geophysical Institute was for active aurora (4 on a scale from 0 to 9), which meant there was a reasonable possibility that there would be some action in the northern skies.

Skies were clear and it was a moonless night, the satellite-based map of northern hemisphere aurora showed high aurora extending over Southeast Alaska, and I heard someone else had seen a burst of activity, so I checked a couple of times and at one point spent a half an hour watching. I never saw anything more than a pale green glow, mostly visible as a slight brightening of the sky behind Gavan Hill. A long camera exposure made the green of the aurora much more visible, though it also resulted in somewhat strange looking trees in shrubs in the foreground, as they were illuminated to varying degrees by neighborhood lights. Although not as dramatic as past shows I’ve seen here, it was nice to see the aurora again. It’s been over 2.5 years since the last time I photographed the northern lights, and I’m pretty sure that was the last time I saw them.