Kinglets: Blink and you might miss one

Published 9:24 pm Friday, February 27, 2009

I nearly crushed it with my foot before the bird took one life-saving hop into the brush. I had but a fraction of a second in the shade to see a gold crown and maybe a greenish cast to its back.

Knee-jerk call: a golden-crowned sparrow, but no, too many problems with my jerking knee. It was too small (nowhere near the typical 7 inches of a golden-crown sparrow), and the wintering adult sparrows aren’t supposed to be sporting a bright gold stripe.

Combining size (3 to 4 inches) with the gold crown and the unseen but not very quiet flitting from one branch to another, the golden-crowned kinglet fit the bill.

One kinglet illustration in David Sibley’s “Field Guide to Birds of Western North America” has a greenish cast to its back, although many bird books do not show this. I did not have the angle to see whether it had a striped face.

Come spring, other colors come into play. Breeding male kinglets can be very aggressive when meeting their competition. They’ll flash crests that, during breeding season, have orange to red feathers.

In addition to the golden crown, they also have a white eyebrow.

In Western Washington, they are common year-round, but some migrate. The largest population is found in wet conifer forests. I’ve seen a small flock of kinglets working over a dirt-and-gravel road, which they do with a lot of wing-flicking.

Always in a hurry, kinglets are foraging for small insects and spiders and their eggs, nailing them with a tiny thin bill. ­Similar to hummingbirds, kinglets are so small that they have a high metabolism and must constantly forage. It takes four or five kinglets to weigh about an ounce.

One study reported that a kinglet could starve to death in an hour, however extreme that might seem. So how do some kinglets survive cold nights if they can’t eat 24 hours a day and do not lower their metabolic rates?

Virginia researchers found that if kinglets could build up enough fat by foraging dawn to dusk, it would carry them through half the night.

The rest of the survival factor can be attributed to huddling together with their heads burrowed into insulating feathers, thus losing less body heat because they have decreased the surface area in relation to mass.

At first light, it’s back to culinary pursuits.

More cuts: Employees of the state Department of Fish and Wildlife have been informed that more than 100 workers may be eliminated because of the state’s budget shortfall. Those cuts may include enforcement officers, biologists and outdoor educators.

Out of luck: Snowmobilers and hikers are plain out of luck if one of their destinations is the area off Glacier Creek Road (Forest Service Road 39), which starts at Milepost 35 off the Mount Baker Scenic Highway.

The road is closed because of slides and is likely to stay that way deep into summer. Hikers will be particularly perturbed because the road leads to Heliotrope Ridge Trail, a major climbing route to Mount Baker and, for hikers, provides access to terrific glacier views and wildflowers.

Weather wizard: Seattle’s PBS affiliate calls Cliff Mass the Northwest’s favorite atmospheric scientist, so we guess there must be another, less renowned atmospheric scientist out there.

Popularity aside, Mass plans to discuss the secrets of Northwest weather on his special, “Cliff Mass: NW Weather,” at 7 p.m. Sunday on KCTS 9.

Mass, a professor at the University of Washington, will delve into the forces that drive the year’s biggest storms, as well as offer tips on weather prediction.

His book, “The Weather of the Pacific Northwest” ($30), is packed with photos and color illustrations and has answers for all those questions about our sometimes extraordinary weather.

Columnist Sharon Wootton can be reached at 360-468-3964 or www.songandword.com.