13 October 2008

Yesterday I saw a palm warbler in Beaver County while hiking at State Gameland #285. 

If you’re not familiar with warblers and you try to identify this bird by his picture alone, he’s pretty confusing.  However, he has a telltale field mark that’s obvious when you see him in person – he incessantly wags his tail up and down.  He’s the only warbler that simply wags his tail without bobbing his rump. His behavior tells me who he is. 

If you relied on the palm warbler’s name to locate him in palm trees, you would never expect to see him in Pennsylvania.  Actually palm warblers were named from a specimen found in winter in Hispaniola, the island that contains Haiti and the Dominican Republic.  In winter, palm warblers may hang out near palm trees but in summer they breed in the bogs and fens of Canada.  They’re the second most northerly nesting warblers.   So much for the name!

And there was another naming twist on my hike:  “green frogs.”  I found five green frogs standing under a waterfall, but all of them looked brown.  If I hadn’t learned their field marks from April Claus at Fern Hollow Nature Center, I would have been fooled.  Green frogs have two raised ridges that run down their backs and their tympanum (outer eardrum) is easy to see.   Indeed they are not always green.  Click here to learn about the many colors of green frogs.

So, what’s in a name?   Well, sometimes it’s just there to fool you. 

(photo by Chuck Tague)