5 minute read
The Kinglets
By Rick Borchelt
With this issue, I’m taking over the BIRDWatch column previously written by my good friend Cecily Nabors, who continues to watch birds in her yard and neighborhood in Silver Spring, MD. I only hope she won’t mind that I regularly turn to her for advice about writing about birds and birding!
Since Cecily is justly known as royalty among us nature writers, it’s fitting to use my first column to share with you some notes about our pint-sized royalty of the winter landscape: the kinglets—both the ruby-crowned and goldencrowned. They’re here in the DC-area only during the cold months, generally from November to March.
Kinglets are our smallest winter birds, with both species averaging a weight of less than 10 grams (about a third of an ounce, less than the weight of four pennies). This is especially amazing given how well adapted to life in cold and snowy winters kinglets are, including their ability to survive the long, freezing nights.
You’ll probably hear kinglets before you see them. You aren’t likely to catch the courtship or territorial songs of kinglets in their breeding range in northern spruce-fir forests, but both the rubyand golden-crowned species engage in incessant chatter to liven up our winter woods and garden soundscapes. The calls of ruby-crowned kinglets are emphatic doubled notes, sometimes described as “che-dit,” repeated over and over. Golden-crowned kinglets usually voice a thin, reedy, high-pitched “tsee-tsee-tsee.” Because goldencrowned kinglet calls are so highpitched, they’re one of the first bird things we older birders lose the ability to detect as our hearing declines.
You’ll want to listen for these calls in the mixed flocks of songbirds that make their way through the winter woods and suburbs. Chickadees and titmice are often in the vanguard of these roaming flocks that band together to forage, sharing the task of keeping an eye out for predators and, by sheer size of their flock, reducing the odds that any one member gets nailed by a hawk or feral cat. Downy woodpeckers, brown creepers, wrens and nuthatches also are often part of these nomadic troops, but kinglets stand out from the crowd for their diminutive size and habit of constantly—and I mean constantly—flicking their wings. Look for the small, nervousacting birds that seldom stop to perch. Golden-crowned kinglets in particular like to hover in the air at the end of branches, inspecting them for insect snacks.
Kinglets get their names from the red (ruby-crowned) or yellow (goldencrowned) feathers on the tops of their heads. But you’ll seldom see these distinctive crests unless the birds are agitated. “Throwing the crest” is how birders refer to a bird that has its crest raised and evident. Otherwise, both kinglets are drab, olive-gray birds; the ruby-crowned has a plain gray face with a white eye ring, while the goldencrowned’s face is boldly striped in black and white. Both species have distinct white wingbars.
Through the winter, these small birds need a protein-rich diet, which they get mostly from small spiders, insects, and other invertebrate morsels. They love nothing better than tearing into moth cocoons and insect egg masses. Kinglets are also quite fond of scale insects and will endlessly pore over leaves and twigs for them. Amazingly, it takes only 10 calories a day to sustain a kinglet. Once back in summer spruce-land, they feast on the caterpillars of the spruce budworm, an omnipresent pest of these trees.
While kinglets coexist easily with each other and with other birds during their winter sojourns, they become feisty landholders once they reach their breeding grounds. The males even build fake nests around their chosen plots to make it look like there are more kinglets in residence than it would seem at first glance.
Despite their diminutive size, kinglets lay some of the largest egg clutches by relative weight in the avian world. It’s not unusual to find a kinglet nest with 10 or more eggs that collectively comprise more than a third of the female’s body weight. Kinglets can support their large broods partly because spruce budworms are so abundant.
Bird taxonomists have kicked kinglets around from one classification to another over the years. They were once lumped in with the Old World warblers, then considered part of the larger waxwing clan. Today, most authorities take the safer route of putting the world’s six kinglet species in their own family, Reguliidae. All but one are in the single genus Regulus (which translates as prince or little king); ruby-crowned sits in its own genus of Corthylio (which derives from the much-less-regal Greek term meaning small, wren-like bird).
With their flare for poetic common names for birds, Europeans adopted equally evocative (if not royal) names for their kinglet analogs: goldcrest and firecrest. These small bits of fluff are otherwise very similar looking, ubiquitous birds of the Continental winter, offering the same little solar flares in the middle of the cold, temperate winters offered by our resident kinglet royalty.
About the author:
Rick Borchelt is a botanist and science writer who gardens and writes about natural history at his home in College Park, MD. Reach him with questions about this column at rborchelt@gmail.com.
