blackburnian_warbler_setophaga_fusca_magee_marsh_ohio_22
Groups of birders flocked to Second Valley in Inverness in September hoping to catch a glimpse  of a single Blackburnian warbler, who likely confused its cardinal directions.   Paul Hurtado

Streaks of black line the orange face and breast of the Blackburnian warbler, an East Coast species that somehow wound up in the alder trees above an Inverness creek this September. Renée Cormier, an avian ecologist for Point Blue Conservation Science, first spotted one with a research associate and a flock of interns near the Second Valley tennis court. “There are a lot of vagrant, or out-of-range, migratory birds that wind up in Point Reyes,…