Color-banded Pine Warbler SL/DD is a candidate for oldest known individual of his species. All photographs by the authors.

When we think about birds on Cape Cod, we picture gulls and alcids flying above the waves or shorebirds feeding on expansive mud flats, their calls drifting over the beach. Or maybe we think about songbird migration, with dreams of spring fallout days in beech forest or rare migrant hunts around the community gardens in the fall. But it is in the pitch pine barrens where we meet the most adventurous, gregarious, and overlooked of Cape Cod’s avian residents: the Pine Warbler. One of the most abundant songbirds on the Outer Cape, Pine Warblers are around and singing all year.

Since 2014, we have been running the migration banding station at Mass Audubon’s Wellfleet Bay Sanctuary, where we first became interested in Pine Warblers. While checking the mist nets one early September day, we spied a flock of songbirds moving toward us along the edge of the pine forest. First came a dozen Eastern Bluebirds, perching up high and calling loud, but most of the flock were smaller and quieter birds. They perched in the trees, hopped on the ground, chased one another, and landed right next to us, still foraging, completely unfazed by our presence. And they just kept coming, Pine Warbler after Pine Warbler, a flock of 30 birds all foraging and chasing with abandon.