BILL DELUCA CAN’T QUITE BELIEVE HIS eyes. The Audubon migration ecologist has spent years studying Blackpoll Warblers on their breeding grounds in remote boreal forests in the United States and Canada. On this morning in late winter 2020, he’s standing in an orange grove in Villavicencio, Colombia, where the Andes Mountains meet the vast Llanos savanna and cattle ranches abound. He’d always pictured Blackpolls overwintering in towering old-growth tropical forests, not in the low canopy of neatly ordered citrus trees. But a sharp chip tells him there are indeed Blackpolls in this manicured landscape. “This is weird,” he says. “So weird.”
Yet the greenish-yellow warblers seem right at home, hunting for insects amid the bustling locals. Blue-gray Tanagers, Russet-throated Puffbirds, and Bananaquits inhabit the low canopy, while Bare-faced Ibis forage along the ground like cattle grazing in a pasture. Crested Caracaras perch on fenceposts along the dirt road, and Wood Storks, Whistling Herons, and White-throated Toucans frequent the adjacent irrigation channel.
Blackpolls may look unremarkable compared to their neighbors here, but as DeLuca knows better than most, they’re worthy of superlatives. In spring males undergo a dramatic costume change, swapping out drab, nonbreeding plumage for striking black and white feathers, complete with the distinctive black crown for which the species is named. Blackpolls migrate farther than any North American warbler, some clocking 12,000 miles round-trip. Even more impressive: Their overwater journey is among the longest of any songbird’s, with some individuals flying 1,700 miles in a three-day nonstop push south over the Atlantic Ocean during hurricane season.
Blackpolls have only recently started to give up long-held secrets. Just seven years ago DeLuca and a team of international colleagues proved the birds make this dangerous oceanic trek by attaching tiny trackers called geolocators to Blackpolls on their boreal breeding grounds. Now, DeLuca is tagging the birds where they overwinter. He’s aided by Colombian scientists Andrea Morales Rozo, Maira Holguin, and Nahbi Romero Rodriguez, who know it’s far easier to catch Blackpolls in these orchards than in the dense Amazon rainforest, where most of the species disperses. In six days of mist netting they’ll affix the dimesize sensors to 23 Blackpolls. The data they recover from any recaptured the following spring will help fill in more pieces of the puzzle of Blackpoll movements.
That information will be a valuable addition to Audubon’s Migratory Bird Initiative,
