VIRGINIAS' WARBLERS

Unsurpassed locale for breeding wood-warblers; cool, mountain climate in both beautiful states; optional visit to Monticello.

$1250 (2009 fee). 5 days
From Charlottesville. Limit: 14
Good accommodations, easy terrain. Our staff travel agents can book your air travel for this tour. Contact us at (800) 728-4953 for more information.

See our triplist for 2008 or 2007 or 2006.

Birding Paddy Knob, with Mourning Warbler habitat in foreground, by guide John Rowlett

Commencing in Albemarle County, home of Thomas Jefferson and the University of Virginia, we’ll visit the James River bottoms and nearby countryside before moving on to the Blue Ridge Parkway where we’ll spend the morning birding a lovely oak forest thickly strewn with an understory of delicate mountain laurel.  Here we should see Cerulean, Kentucky, Hooded, Worm-eating, Northern Parula, and Black-and-white warblers.  From there we’ll head west across the Valley through submontane George Washington National Forest, interrupted by lush mountain meadows, on a leisurely drive to West Virginia and the varied habitats of the Monongahela National Forest.  During our next two days, we’ll explore Virginia’s exquisitely beautiful Blue Grass Valley and its gently surrounding slopes for nesting Golden-winged Warblers and two of America’s finest birds—Bobolink and Red-headed Woodpecker—as well as West Virginia’s spruce and hardwood forests and mountain meadows.

Precious few places in the East hold the enchantment of the southernmost spruce bogs at this time of year.  Swampy, moss-choked rhododendron thickets, dark coniferous forests with towering red spruce, dappled mixed forests, open, vine-entangled slopes of dense shrubs, and lightly clad, succession-growth knobs provide nesting habitats for a surprising variety of boreal species, some of which reach their southern limit here as regular breeders.  Among these are Northern Waterthrush and Yellow-rumped Warbler, but wood-warblers are everywhere, including Black-throated Green, Magnolia, Canada, Blackburnian, Mourning, and Black-throated Blue.

And while this tour is designed around Parulids, there are numerous eastern breeders to enjoy, including four species of Empidonax flycatchers, all of which should be singing in May.  Musical breeders such as Winter Wren, Purple Finch, and Rose-breasted Grosbeak add to the brilliant songfest; the evening chorale of thrushes is alone worth the visit; and Barred Owls confabulate well into the night, long after the birders have retired.

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• 1+ 512-263-7295
• 1+ 512-263-0117 (fax)

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