The Pelee phenomenon
It was a chilly spring morning. Wind stirred the precarious waters offshore. Above the beach, a loose line of men and women hustled along a sandy path, which followed the crest of dunes overgrown with grasses and junipers. The people, wearing sweaters and windbreakers, ranged in age from high school students to retired seniors. They spoke breathlessly, but mostly in low tones. Any undue noise might draw withering looks from the others. Everyone kept pressing ahead and some people, more anxious than others, even tried to pass on the narrow trail. As they drew near their destination, murmurs of excitement passed backward along the line, though many were strangers to one another.
All at once they drew together into a crowd of several dozen, forming a rough semicircle around a small evergreen. Everyone raised field glasses and focussed on the tree. Then some realized the naked eye worked easier at such a close range. At first we maintained a discrete distance. But soon, realizing our treasure was too busy to vanish, the group edged forward slightly.
What creature had brought these people running so eagerly? There it was, in that stunted pine! For all our trouble, the wondrous creature was barely larger than a mouse.
Rare jewel
But it was decorated like a queen's most beautiful bauble. In any other context it would have flitted away from such human commotion. But this bird had already flown 2,000 km (1,250 miles) from its winter home in the Bahamas and crossed a large unruly lake. It still had another 300 km (188 miles) to reach Michigan's northern Lower Peninsula, but for now it was tired and hungry. It had found minute insects in this line of conifers on the West Beach of Point Pelee National Park in Ontario, Canada. It had more important things to do than worry about some silly people.
That was May 10, 1996, and I was there. The bird was a Kirtland's warbler. It is still one of North America's most seriously endangered bird species, although its numbers have more than quadrupled since 1987. The census that year counted only 167 singing males in the 10 Michigan counties where it is known to breed (read more information). Spotting my first one was an exciting moment for me as a naturalist, and to watch it for 10 minutes at a range almost too close for binoculars!
Fragile habitat
I grew up practically within sight of Point Pelee, to the west along Lake Erie's north shore. In fact we could have seen the point if the land wasn't so low. It consists of a sand spit jutting a few kilometers into the lake. A person could walk the entire length in an afternoon. It features dunes, beaches, broad inland marshes, and Canada's most southerly mainland tip, on the same latitude as Northern California. Less remarkable, but perhaps most important, are a few scraps of precious Carolinian Forest, which used to cover much of Southwestern Ontario but has virtually vanished since European colonization.
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