On October 14th I lead a trip for the Blue Ridge Young Birders Club to the Rockfish Valley Trail, a local birding hotspot in Nelson County.  I had high hopes for the trip, as the Rockfish Valley Trail tends to be a very productive place for finding uncommon and rare migrants in the fall, with Philadelphia vireo and Lincoln’s sparrows often present.  Only a few weeks previously I’d had one of the best mornings of birding in my life there, finding Philadelphia vireo and blue-winged, Connecticut and mourning warblers.  Around this time of year last year, my brother and I had two marsh wrens.  Six young birders attended the trip.

We walked under Route 151, doing our best to avoid getting our feet wet in the water overflowing from the South Fork of the Rockfish River.  The day was cool and cloudy but not unpleasantly so.  We encountered a large flock of song sparrows in a dense tangle of pokeweed and began scanning them for Lincoln’s.   We didn’t find any Lincoln’s in that flock but saw a few swamp sparrows.  As we were walking along a mowed path through a dense, brushy field, a tiny, bright yellow bird dropped out of a tree and into the grass.  Curious about what this could be so late in the year, we went to investigate.  The bird popped up onto a low branch of a black walnut tree for a few seconds, and I saw it was a Wilson’s warbler.

We continued around the loop towards the back of the field, where we encountered more sparrows.  I put my binoculars up to one and saw that it had a yellowish malar, gray supercilium and a yellowish breast covered in super fine, dark streaks — a Lincoln’s sparrow.  I think everyone got on the bird, although it soon hopped back down into the brush.

A flock of purple finches flew over and landed in the branches of a leafless oak.  We soon began hearing more purple finch calls, and several other flocks joined the first.  By the end of the day we counted 34 in small flyover and foraging flocks.  It was still early in the year for purple finches and seeing them in these numbers was encouraging for a good winter for them in our area.

Purple Finch (Haemorhous purpureus)

As we rounded the bend in the path a flock of birds flew up into a tree.  One appeared to be a Catharus thrush, which my brother got on and said looked like a gray-cheeked.  We slowly crept to the other side of the tree so as not to scare the thrush again and saw that it was indeed a gray-cheeked thrush.  We re-found the Wilson’s warbler and a late Eastern wood-pewee nearby.

Once we got back to the top of the loop where we first saw the Wilson’s warbler, we paused for a bit to listen.  I heard a yellowthroat chipping in a large patch of common mugwort, so I went to investigate.  I found the yellowthroat and a couple of palm warblers, and I was just about to return to the group when Baxter called that he thought he had a Connecticut warbler.  The group assembled behind him and we slowly advanced towards the bird, which was entirely obscured by the dense mugwort.  I got a brief glimpse of the bird through the vegetation and saw a large warbler with a pale gray hood and a thin eye ring.  Suddenly the bird lifted off and flew to the end of the mugwort patch, followed a second later by a similar looking bird.  There were two of them!  Chaos ensued as everyone tried to see the birds while we debated their ID’s.  Eventually we cornered the two birds in a corner of the mugwort patch, and everyone got a decent look.  Their eye rings, although fairly extensive, were not complete, making them mourning warblers, not Connecticuts.  Finding two of them was still extremely exciting, and it was a Nelson County high count.  We photographed a beautiful blue-headed vireo in a willow along the river on our way back towards the cars.

Blue-headed Vireo (Vireo solitarius).  Photo by Baxter Beamer.

The next location for the trip was State Route 610, a quiet mountain road that can sometimes have good migrants.  When we arrived the area was totally quiet.  We had to walk down the road for five minutes before we even heard a bird, which was a pileated woodpecker.  I did not give up hope, as I’d birded up here many times before when it first appeared very slow but then incredible bird activity occurred in explosive bursts.  Sure enough, a few minutes later the forest suddenly rang with a cacophony of warbler chips, and birds could be seen moving in every tree.  The vast majority of the warblers were blackpoll, but we also found several other species including Tennessee, Cape May, bay-breasted, pine and black-throated green.  Kinglets were also present in high numbers — we had fifteen golden-crowned and five ruby-crowned on a small stretch of road.  I spotted a red-eyed vireo, which was beginning to get late, as well as another blue-headed vireo.

Rockfish Valley Trail and State Route 610 did not let us down!