Stalking the golden swamp bird

First of all, call it the golden swamp bird or golden swamp warbler (GSB or GSW for short). That’s what it is, after all, and wild creatures should be called what they are. The great blue heron is, after all, as is the red-headed woodpecker, the black bear and the redwood tree. These names are easy to remember and evocative — they’re invitations. The golden swamp bird’s actual name, prothonotary warbler, is none of the above. It’s an almost unpronounceable malapropism apparently derived from a type of papal scribe that wore yellow — an allusion lost on nearly all of us. It’s an abuse of language, a barrier, an intentional divide between the avian illuminati and illiterati. Enough with it, I say.¹

I know the golden swamp bird from the Pocomoke, a tidal river on the Delmarva peninsula that’s become one of my primary paddling and soaking-in-nature spots over the last few years. Forests of ash and cypress — more on these later — hug the shores, and in fact muddy the distinction between river and shore, as they grow not just near the water but in the water, accreting soil and building islands of life that merge with the land — which, to be fair, is not entirely land, either. Such is the swamp — a space where our definitions and dualities go to die.

The swamp bird itself, a migrant, arrives sometime in spring — the earliest I’ve seen it is May 13, but I suspect it’s here well before then. I imagine the first one flying in from the south exhausted but with relief at the appearance of the watery forest it knows from instinct, ancestral memory. It calls its brothers and sisters and cousins and soon the swamp, which was silent and drab all winter, is a riot of amber and song.

Usually, you hear them before you see them. The bird announces itself with a volley of rapid-fire, crescendoing high-pitched tweets, between six and eight in succession. It’s not the most melodious call, but it’s a helpful beacon for the seeker. Typically, one bird will sing and go silent, then another will answer. This being breeding season, I imagine them singing to each other, “your place or mine?” But who knows what information is encoded in these songs? Maybe they’re just gossiping, or arguing.

I first catch sight of the bird on a branch as I’m resting on a mossy tree that’s fallen across the upper reaches of Corker’s Creek, a tributary of the Pocomoke. The impediment has brought an end to my foray up this waterway, but I’m not ready to head back yet. I focus my binoculars. This bird is generous, staying in place for several minutes — long enough, in fact, that I have to put down my binos and rest my straining neck. I watch it eat a caterpillar, then call repeatedly.

I’ve been coming to Pocomoke River since early in the pandemic. It’s a tidal river in the Chesapeake Bay system whose riparian forests have managed to stay healthy to all appearances, despite flowing through a landscape that’s been largely denuded of trees and farmed for several hundred years. On satellite maps, the Pocomoke cuts a swath of dark green through a mosaic of yellow. I suspect its banks hold the most ecologically intact forests in Maryland, and much of it is now state parkland or Nature Conservancy reserves. On past trips, I’ve focused on the trees, especially the green and pumpkin ash trees that make up at least half the forest here. I know their future is precarious — the emerald ash borer is making its way east across the peninsula and will soon arrive, if it hasn’t already, and start feasting on the trees.

But this weekend, I decide to focus more on the warbler. I’m not a birder, so this is new territory for me. I soon realize I will need to learn to think like the bird. If I were one, where would I want to be? I also realize I will need to slow down and get used to waiting — not my natural state. I park my canoe under a young cypress. Sure enough, a bird soon emerges from the trees, alights on a low shrub and starts to hop around in its fitful way. I train my binos on it. After a few more hops it flies toward me — it almost feels like it’s going to fly right into me. By the time I put my binos down and turn my neck to try and follow it, it’s out of sight. I feel like I’m getting somewhere.

I paddle down the creek, swollen with high tide, and am soon tempted into a side channel, which leads to a bayou of sorts, where I squeeze through narrow passages between cypress and ash hummocks. This is the warbler’s domain. I am a clumsy, incompetent visitor — one who needs a 12-foot shell of plastic to keep my body afloat. As I struggle to make progress, the birds weave through the trunks in flights too fast to follow, invariably landing with utmost grace on a narrow branch. I can’t do this. You can’t do this. The tide is going out now and I need to retreat to avoid getting stranded. The bird, of course, has no such worries.

Later I get my camera out and click the telephoto lens into place. I’m no longer just paddling; I’m on a mission. I’m stalking the golden swamp warbler. The river chorus divides in two: the golden bird’s song and all the others — ones I mostly can’t recognize and frankly couldn’t care less about at the moment. I’m starting to feel the bird’s rhythms. It will sing a while, then, maybe, hop into view, giving me a short time to capture it before it takes flight, usually across the river and into the brush on the other side. The wind has picked up and pushes my boat around as I try to train the camera. The camera doesn’t want to focus on a tiny bird amid leaves and branches. The bird itself flits here and there, into and out of shade. For a good photo, all three need to align: bird, boat, camera.

The birds, as far as I know, don’t know they’re part of this game I’m playing. Yet I feel sometimes like they’re taunting me. They sing, I wait, they don’t appear. Then as I’m paddling, one chases another across the river, passing so close I could reach out with my paddle and touch them, if I were fast enough. They land in bushes and I swivel the boat around. But they don’t stay still and eventually I lose them in the undergrowth. Later, the birds sing directly above our campsite, up in the treetops and out of sight. One alights on a bush just a few feet away, but I don’t have my camera.

Stalking focuses and stills the mind. Annie Dillard writes, “Stalking is a pure form of skill, like pitching or playing chess. Rarely is luck involved.” She continues, “stalking is a game played in the actual present.” When she has finally figured out the creature she’s stalking — a muskrat — she writes, “I felt a rush of such pure energy I thought I would not need to breathe for days.”

I can hardly claim to have devoted myself to the craft as Dillard says she did, nor felt that pureness of energy, but in several hours on the water spent stalking the golden swamp bird, I managed to achieve the three-part alignment once and snap a pretty decent photo (I think): the image you see at the top of this post. In it the bird is singing, with one leg straight and the other at a jaunty angle, as if doing a dance move. To me it looks like the bird is engaged in a bit of performance, but maybe that’s just me projecting human ideas onto it.

I don’t mind the low rate of return; those hours were utterly enjoyable. I’m grateful that we now have a way to satisfy the urge of the hunt — surely one of the most primal urges — without the bloodshed and murder and waste that used to accompany it. I feel like I’ve captured a piece of this wildness for myself, and yet this marvelous bird is alive and well and, I hope, unbothered, free to pursue whatever it’s pursuing today — a mate, a meal, a memory. Two lives — one avian, one human — have briefly intertwined and now go their separate ways, one the better for it and the other none the worse.

Golden swamp warbler nesting hole?

There are many kinds of warblers — over 50 species inhabit North America alone — but the golden swamp warbler is one of the few that needs swamps. It nests in holes in trees made by woodpeckers or decay. It winters in tropical mangrove forests, then comes north to the swamps of the Atlantic coastal plain and Mississippi River basin to breed. I marvel at the bird’s tiny size relative to the huge trees that nurture it. I marvel at the brilliant yellow plumage amid the otherwise almost entirely green and brown landscape. I even marvel at the grey wing feathers, which give the bird a dignified appearance, as though it were wearing a suit jacket. The bird is this swamp’s most precious product, its crown jewel — its Mona Lisa, its Large Hadron Collider.

No human factory or lab can produce golden swamp warblers; only swamps can. They’re marvels of avian engineering and artistry that we have produced no equal to, and probably never will. Swamps do many great things, but even if all they did was produce this one bird, and the trees and insects that sustain it, that would be enough reason to cherish them, protect them, try to reverse their destruction.

It’s not quite visually obvious yet, but this particular swamp is on the cusp of a disruption more profound than it has seen certainly in my lifetime, and perhaps much longer. I see enough ash trees with bare upper branches and decayed bark revealing blond wood beneath that I’m almost sure the emerald ash borer is here, doing its invisible damage, though I don’t yet see the signs that would prove it beyond a doubt — the ash borer itself (almost never seen) or the telltale D-shaped exit holes.

I want a scientist to start surveying warblers here and continue through the coming ecological chaos. It could be a revealing project. I imagine that at first, the ash borer’s impact might be positive for the bird — more decaying and dying trees, more nesting holes. But eventually the trees will crumble and fall, sunlight will flood in and the swamp might start to feel more like semi-open marsh. Fortunately, the bird does not require ash trees per se, and there is cypress here as well as ash, but it does require trees. What will happen when half the trees are gone?

I’m reminded of the lament that in conservation, you have to win over and over, and you can’t afford to lose even once. In this case the opponent isn’t some developer with a bulldozer looking to build the next housing development, but rather the ceaseless and ever-changing insults our capitalistic economy throws at natural ecosystems. First it was deforestation for iron smelting, then agriculture with its associated wetland drainage, later a catastrophic fire that destroyed much of the remaining cypress swamps on the lower peninsula.

Now global trade has ushered in a new set of threats — diseases and insects obscure in their homelands yet incomparably deadly when paired with species closely related to their native hosts. Our old ways of protecting things — declaring them parks and preserves — are useless against pests that ignore property lines. And while these forests are recovering from the ash borer in the decades ahead, saltwater will be creeping up thanks to sea level rise, bringing with it a whole new set of stresses.

What this will mean for the golden swamp bird is unknowable. But I do know that as much as the golden swamp bird needs the swamp, the swamp needs the bird, too. The ash trees that hold this place together are trees that only a true nature fanatic could love. They’re crooked, not particular wide, not particularly tall and in truth, rather ungainly compared to their neighbors, the towering, straight-trunked and graceful cypresses. Indeed, the state agency that manages this park hardly acknowledges the ash’s existence. I suppose at this point it would be awkward to celebrate them, given they’re about to be wiped out.

The lack of attention paid and resources given to the Pocomoke River forests baffles me. Even though we’ve known for years that the ash borer is coming, I’m not aware of any effort to prepare or even monitor these forests. Perhaps they’re too far from major population centers (although Washingtonians and Marylanders stream toward nearby Ocean City all summer); perhaps they suffer from lack of charismatic megafauna like the wolf or Florida panther or the Assateague ponies; perhaps it’s just too much to ask people to get behind a campaign to save a tree they’ve never even heard of.

But the trees make the birds. And the birds move and feast and sing; they dance and court and play games. In short, they’re a thousand times more relatable to us humans than mute, motionless trees. They’re the banner this remarkable, yet largely unheralded place needs. So let’s stop obscuring this beautiful bird behind an ugly name. From now on, call it the golden swamp warbler.

1. The suggestion to rename the bird is not my idea; it goes back at least to Bagg and Eliot’s 1937 Birds of the Connecticut Valley. I’m not sure why it hasn’t caught on.