Welcome to September everyone! By now everyone knows what I am up to all day and all night so no need to belabor that point beyond apologizing more for being out of pocket for a good portion of this month. The good news is Brad and Jan have made it back safely from their latest excursion with SD cards full of future Intrigued fodder. I suspect it will take them some time to parse and process all the finds from that recent adventure (they have a ways to go before closing in on my 3 year backlog level…ha), but he has several accounts from outings earlier in the year that we will be featuring this month. To start things off, let’s go with some field work we did together.
Take it away Brad…
It was time for the 2nd Annual Intrigued Corporate Warbler Watch and Walk in the Woods. Actually, that sounds like a good thing to start officially, with a bit of rebranding: Intrigued (or International) Warbler Watch & Walk in the Woods, or the IW4. Intrigued HQ started it here first, go spread the word! I think that might be a great T-shirt idea paired with our corporate logo. We must get the Intrigued marketing department to work on that right away. (XXL Tall in Tec for me please.)
I met Brian at Intrigued HQ to start our day. When I arrived at HQ, Brian had already been chasing a Tennessee Warbler around the estate. Being new to this bird, I asked what color it was (guessing a shade of yellow) so I could look for motion. Brian replied, “It’s olive-colored with some yellow on it.” Great! Just like every single leaf in the woods at that point. We could certainly hear two of them communicating. I think one was saying, “Watch this, I can get those guys to look over here.” And the other would reply, “Good one, now it’s my turn. Watch their heads snap around the other direction.” After spending time being laughed at by the Tennessee Warbler (they can trash talk, must have learned it from Raven and Ruger), we decided to expand our warbler search to nearby Jubilee State Park grounds. Luckily, the park is only a few minutes from HQ and makes for great “Work from Woods” days.
Brian led us down a new trail, well, new to Intrigued outings at least. However, a new trail always has the risk of an unseen root reaching up to grab you. A couple of hundred feet into the trail, even I could make out warbler calls throughout the woods without using Merlin, though it is good for a memory aid to have bird songs and calls recorded with the timestamp to help sort photos later.
After a brief hike and photographing warblers for about 90 minutes (do you know how spastic they can be?), we decided to head to a new spot to see what we could see. Cresting a small hill, Brian noticed the trail back to the parking lot was mostly mud near the creek. The whole area had just had inches of rain a few days prior. What good are hiking boots if they aren’t muddy? We continued.
In the middle of the squishiest part of the trail, Brian said to stop and pointed to a small tree. I followed his outstretched arm to find a small yellow dot flitting about the twigs in a tree.
Hit the jump to find out what caught our attention!
Continue reading Cha Cha Slide…by Brad Marks
Wildlife Intrigued 