This Is My Tribe

This chapter reflects on the author's first time seeing a ruby-crowned kinglet in the spring of sophomore year in high school. The author had gone to Presque Isle on Lake Erie to look for spring migrants with some birding buddies. Often during the third week of May, thousands of northbound birds congregate on this thin peninsula before making the overwater flight across the lake. Many of these species only pass through Pennsylvania from their Latin America winter homes to Canada's boreal forests where they breed. In Washington, wintering kinglets migrate down from high-elevation spruce-fir forests where they breed or from Canadian breeding sites, to live through the cold months in the Puget Sound lowlands.