By Sally Siko

By far, one of the prettiest birds I was lucky to find last week while birding in eastern KY was this Blue winged Warbler.
I’d been trying to photograph one for years without success so it was super exciting to finally add this lifer to my list!
Funny thing was that the first one I saw (at Lakeview Park in Lexington, KY) I actually missed my shots completely resulting in blurry unusable photos.
Happily though I got another chance a couple days later in Bowen, KY to grab this series of portraits of a Blue winged hunting for a meal in the brush.

During the spring and summer months, you can hear a Blue winged Warblers familiar call of “beeee-buzzzz zzza zzza” song when walking in a grassy field lining a wooded area containing thick underbrush. They’ll often pop out from the dark thickets at the woods edge into the open to flutter on the edges of trees and bushes in an effort to glean insects hiding in the leaves.

In the past their breeding range extended from the open woodlands of Tennessee, Kentucky, West Virginia northern Alabama, and northern Georgia.
Today, Blue-winged Warblers have been expanding northward and now can be found throughout southern New England, southern Ontario, and the southern portions of the Great Lakes states.
In fact some of the highest breeding densities of Blue wings can be found in the higher elevations of the Appalachian Mountains, in the norther tier of the mid-Atlantic states, and even as far west as Wisconsin and Michigan.

Aren’t they lovely?

Photos by @sally_siko of @bestlife_birding on my beloved full frame 50MP beast, the mighty @canonusa #5Ds