Stoked to find this handsome male Prothonotary Warbler about 3 weeks ago at Bass Lake Park in Holly Springs, NC.!
I’ve been watching him since early April and it never gets old seeing his cheerful yellow face belting out a tune from within the maple leaves.
I recently came across fascinating study of the Prothonotary Warbler which found that nearly the entire species winters in a single small area in South America.
Not long ago, Biologists from the O.S.U. captured around 150 Prothonotary Warblers during their breeding season here in the southeastern U.S. and attached geolocators to the birds.
These tiny electronic devices use the timing of dawn and dusk to estimate birds’ locations once the biologists set them free.
When the warblers returned to their nesting sites the following season, the researchers were able to recover 34 devices that contained enough info for them to use for their study.
The data showed that regardless of where they bred, nearly ALL of the warblers spent their winter in a relatively small concentrated area of northern Colombia.

To give you an idea of just how amazing this is, the trip from Raleigh to northern Colombia is about 2000 miles!
That is one incredible journey for a bird that weighs about 4oz.
The fact that most of them end up spending the winter in one tiny area of the world is absolutely mind boggling!

Photo by @sally_siko of @birdwatching_nc
Canon 5Ds