| Considering that North Carolina is about halfway between the species' wintering grounds in the Bahamas and breeding grounds in Michigan, one would think that Kirtland's Warbler might be a regular transient through our area. Well, in actuality, it probably is. However, the rarity is mostly explained in a simple way -- there are perhaps 4-5,000 individuals in the world, as opposed to many times more than that -- 100 to 1,000 times more -- for practically all other warbler species. The chance that a birder would encounter a Kirtland's is thus quite remote. At least, there are now about 15 accepted records, in addition to a handful of others than have not been accepted or yet reviewed by the NC BRC. [A species this rare needs nearly indisputable details for acceptance of a sight report.] Nine records are for the mountains, four are for the Piedmont, but only two are from the Coastal Plain. Only two are from spring and the others are from the fall season; nearly all occur between 23 Sep and 3 Oct, rarely to 15 Oct. Oddly, even though the species has to migrate in fall over much of the entire state, the preponderance of records from the mountains is not an artifact of birding effort, as the Piedmont has (by far) more birders and effort. Thus, these birds (at least in fall) deliberately drop down from nighttime migration much more frequently in the mountains, and essentially fly over the Piedmont and Coastal Plain (where there is much birding effort in fall along the coast) without stopping.
In October 2019, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service removed the species directly from the Endangered Species list. Thus, it went from an Endangered status to no status, and thus bypassing the Threatened status listing. This seems odd, as the global population is only a few thousand birds. |