As birders, we tend to believe, often correctly, that the bird we are looking at is the same one we just saw seconds before. I nearly fell into this trap recently at Fort Pierce Inlet State Park. I was walking the Red Bay Run Trail when I spied an Ovenbird, one of very few I had seen to that point this spring. It flew on and I tracked it down around the corner. I watched it walking away from me, carefully flipping individual leaves over as it went. I thought that was a little odd; it was acting exactly like a Swainson’s Warbler, the species everyone else was seeing but not yet me this spring. I kept watching and the bird hopped up on a short stick, turned its head to the side showing off its massive bill (for a warbler) and dark eye line as if to say, “Hey stupid, I ain’t no stinkin’ Ovenbird.” Finally, I had found a Swainson’s Warbler for my St. Lucie County list!
This reminded me of my first Swainson’s Warbler on August 20, 1985 or 86. I was down by Mud Lake in the woods behind the house I grew up in. A warbler, I thought it was a Worm-eating Warbler, was walking along a horizontal Live Oak limb (probably in Resurrection Fern, but I didn’t know plants back then) when it turned its head to look down on me, revealing the brown unstriped cap and black eye line. That was the first and last time that I looked up at a foraging Swainson’s Warbler.
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