Eno's Pond Park 12/12--Townsend's Warbler

© Steve Weiss
Many thanks for permission to use. 

For the third time in an as many weeks, I went down to Eno's Pond Park, a relatively obscure park in Forked River where the front end is a county park and the back part a section of Forsythe NWR. It is the front part, a lawn and paved path just before the woods, where 2 Townsend's Warblers have been hanging out, one a male and the other either an immature male or a female (they look similar).  The normal range for these birds is out west. On Sunday, I'd spent 4 hours walking around this very small park in intermittent rain and drizzle looking for either one of these birds without any luck, although I did see my first Purple Finches of the year, as well as a very late Osprey & Baltimore Oriole. When I arrived, I met a photographer/birder I know who'd seen the male around a half hour before. He pointed out the area, maybe half a football field away. I resigned myself to staring into cedars and waiting. 

At least on Sunday there were a lot of birds to sort through including dozens of Yellow-rumped Warblers, each of which had to be glassed as one of them could actually be the Townsend's. Today's activity was not nearly as lively. Other birders and photographers appeared, and I paced back and forth with them for about an hour, which is stretching the limits of my patience. The Osprey flew overhead, so I had one rare bird to report, but then I decided to go toward the entrance of the park where I'd spent most of Sunday, just to find some birds, tired as I was at staring at cedar trees. When I got toward the parking lot, Steve showed up, so I walked back through the lawn with him, hoping my luck would change. But I couldn't bear just standing there anymore, so the wacky idea of actually walking into the cedar grove occurred to me. I didn't walk in more than 20 feet when I saw and heard some action in the trees--yellow-rumps, naturally, as well as a titmouse chattering. I looked at the 5 or 6 yellow-rump above me when one of them, in a skinny cedar was not a yellow-rump but, finally, the male Townsend's with its very distinct black mask and heavy barring on the flanks. I called for the group, but the bird moved off, leaving in its wake a Blue-headed Vireo which everyone else managed to see but all I got was a non-countable silhouette for a brief second. 

I hate when, on rare occasions, I'm the only one to spot the bird. Even though I'm positive of my sighting, I still feel both like a phony and undeservedly lucky, so I was happy & relieved when after about another half hour (I just couldn't bring myself to leave), Steve spotted the warbler high up in some cedars, on the left side of the path that goes into the wooded section of the park. It wasn't too far away from where I'd made my initial sighting and in the direction that both the Townsend's and vireo had gone. Steve again saw the vireo and Larry again missed it, but we all did get much better, if brief looks, at the Townsend's. Steve kindly provided the photograph above, since I don't do well at multi-tasking. My camera is way too slow to photograph a flitting warbling at a distance.

I thought this was just a county lifer and state year bird, assuming that I'd seen the species on our Oregon trip but it turns out that while I did have a have a few western warblers on the trip, I missed Townsend's a couple of times, so this turned out to be year bird too. 

It's a Townsend's Warbler for the time being, but since the American Ornithological Society has resolved to rename all "eponymous species" this bird will eventually have a new "common" name. Ostensibly, the rationale is that an eponymous common name tells you nothing about the species whereas something like "Black-and-white Warbler" does, but that is a very thin reed since it is hard to see the red belly of a Red-bellied Woodpecker, virtually no one has ever seen the orange crown of an Orange-crowned Warbler, and many, many species have place names that are wildly irrelevant to the bird like Cape May Warbler, Philadelphia Vireo, or Carolina Wren.  The real reason is "inclusiveness" because a lot of these birds have been named after people whose lives we don't approve of anymore. (Townsend, from what I can tell, led a relatively blameless and impoverished life--although he did study to be a dentist so I can imagine someone hating him for that--but he never practiced.) It is hard for me to imagine someone developing an aversion to birding because of the names of birds--bird names are just sounds after a while--it's hard enough to distinguish a Cooper's Hawk from a Sharp-shinned without worrying about who Cooper was. 

So I was wondering today what the Townsend's new name might be. Black-masked Warbler? Black-striped Yellow Warbler? Sometimes the binomial scientific names are descriptions of the bird, but in this case it is no help since the scientific name for Townsend's Warbler is Setophaga townsendii. And there's the irony. Since the real name is the binomial, and since the binomial is sacrosanct, the birds will still retain their bad guy eponyms in many cases. 

Example: 

McCown's Longspur. McCown was a confederate officer and Native American killer who happened to come upon this species in the west while taking a break from his genocidal activities and had it named for him. Recently the name was changed to the descriptive Thick-billed Longspur. Good, it does have a very heavy beak. However, the binomial scientific name: Rhynchophanes mccownii. If you bother to translate that into English it means McCown's Thick-billed Longspur. The name isn't really changed at all. So if this isn't patronizing, I don't know what is--what the AOS is essentially saying is--get interested in birds, but don't study them too hard, or you might find how what they're really called.