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Breeding Prothonotaries



After suffering a prolonged 'prothonotary drought' I seem to have struck
it rich as yesterday while walking along the shores of Jordan Lake I
stumbled across a nesting Prothonotary which I watched for over half an
hour. I will share what I saw and heard, in case it is of interest to
others on this list.
The adult (I couldn't tell if it was the mother or the father) was in the
process of feeding one 'teenager' which had fully fledged and could fly
very well indeed. I first saw the warblers because the adult was
singing. After feeding the baby once the adult flew off to a little cove
on the lake and foraged for itself. Eventually it settled down quite high
(about 20 feet) on a maple and preened itself thoroughly for some twenty
minutes. Every few minutes it would hold its head up and give its song, to
which the baby replied with answering chirps somewhere deep in the willows
in the cove. Once or twice the baby attempted the song but it seemed weak
and unconvincing. Anyway, I could see that the two were keeping in touch
with each other through the song and chirp sequence. Finally the baby
reappeared and I saw it forage, its movements tentative and jerky. The
interesting thing was that in foraging it went up into the crowns of
maple trees (about 30 feet up). I hadn't thought that Prothons foraged
that high--did I simply not know this or was this an erring teenager? And
then the adult and baby both flew into the top of a slender, dead maple
tree which had a woodpecker (?) hole at the very top. The tree consiste of
only the dead snag, the branches having disappeared completely. The top of
the tree was about 15 to 20 feet off the ground. Here the adult fed the
baby a second time before flying off inland. What impressed me about all
of this was how high up the prothons remained throughout. Usually I see
them
foraging in willows at eye level as I kayak on lakes, but these prothons
gave me warbler necks throughout the half hour I watched them, and they
didn't, for the most part, forage in willows, but in maples. 
Oh, and there were Louisiana Waterthrushes and mating Red Eyed Vireos in
the same woods, and then, just as I was walking away, bobwhites calling in
the brush. All in all, very satisfying.

*****************************************************
SHANTANU PHUKAN
Lecturer in Urdu-Hindi & Indian Literature
University of N. Carolina, Chapel Hill
Curriculum in Asian Studies
Alumni Hall 413C
Chapel Hill, N.C. 27599

phukan@email.unc.edu
919-962-6825
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