The Gray Dogwood Shrub is loaded with white berries these days.

This morning, at Col. Sam Smith Park on a lovely day, our group noticed several Yellow-rumped Warblers feasting on these berries.

I’ve always thought that warblers in general were insect eaters and had a look at the diet of the Yellow-rumped Warbler on the allaboutbirds.org website.

Yellow-rumped Warblers eat mainly insects in the summer, including caterpillars and other larvae, leaf beetles, bark beetles, weevils, ants, scale insects, aphids, grasshoppers, caddisflies, craneflies, and gnats, as well as spiders. They also eat spruce budworm, a serious forest pest, during outbreaks. On migration and in winter they eat great numbers of fruits, particularly bayberry and wax myrtle, which their digestive systems are uniquely suited among warblers to digest. The habit is one reason why Yellow-rumped Warblers winter so much farther north than other warbler species.

Other birds:

Sadly, we found a deceased Nashville Warbler.

A Mink was also seen:

Today’s group:

Miles note:

In January 2021, I drove to Tilsonberg to pick up a “ragdoll” kitten for my youngest daughter and made a post called “Trip to a Tilsonberg Cattery” in which I put these two kitten photos:

Here is the grown-up cat:

Thanks to Eugene Knapik for this short video from this morning.

NATURE POETRY

Sing a song of Summer,
The world is nearly still,
The mill-pond has gone to sleep,
And so has the mill.                          – William Cosmo Monkhouse (1840–1901)

Miles Hearn