When I first started keeping backyard lists on eBird around 13 years ago, every time I listed Pine Warbler it would be flagged as "rare." Dutifully, I would take a picture and embed the photo in my list. But because the bird was "rare," and I am borderline OCD, I felt compelled to take a picture and list it every time I saw a Pine Warbler in our backyard, and I saw a Pine Warbler in our backyard every day. Sometimes more than one; once, I saw seven hanging around the suet and in the cedars. Finally, it got to be too much even for me. I wrote to the eBird reviewer and told him that I had Pine Warblers in the backyard all the time, that they weren't really all that rare in the (who'da thunk it) Pine Barrens, and that as my late friend Pete Bacinksi use to explain, they were just overlooked because they were more or less silent. Something must have resonated, because now Pine Warbler is merely "infrequent" at least in the 20km x 20km square that eBird uses as measure in which our house sits.
Today, looking out the window in the living room at our camera feeder I saw our first Pine Warbler of 2025. Naturally, I had to list that one. I checked the history on the camera feeder and saw that it has been snatching seeds all morning. The camera feeder takes pretty good pictures, so long as you remember to clean the lens every once in a while.
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