This is Bird Note. I'm Jay Drew Lanham, an ornithologist, naturalist, and writer,

and this is a note I've written to a bird I love.

Dear Kentucky Warbler, are you real? It's hard to believe the way that citrine melds into your mossy olive drab back, and those black sideburns drip down your cheeks.

Remembering a close encounter with you one mid-May day for about half an hour, and I thought I'd crossed over some ethereal boundary into another world. You singing that

ringing, redep, redeep, redep, redep, telling me you're hidden deep in the gap tangle of some new

greening spring woods, the resounding solo as a sirens draw into warblerific joy.

Besides searching in vain for your other uber skulky friends like the Connecticut and morning warblers, you've revealed yourself to me from time to time as a bird blessing.

I'm hoping that you find more tangles to hang out in and maybe make more little ones like

yourself. I know it's getting harder to find the special tangly spots in big woods. You

need to be who you are, but I promise to keep working hard to save your biny world. Sure,

Kentucky might be your name, but I claim you in my own state of heart and mind,

my side-burned bird. Adoringly, Drew.