Bird Watching Curaçao – HOME

When ‘Hoody’ is taking a bath

Our very first introduction to an Hooded Warbler was in the first week of October 2019 while bird watching on the small island of Klein Curaçao, located east of the big island. As you can imagine this meeting was one of a kind, and will be described later in a separate post. (Cause I noticed that I am so behind in my blog posts and LIFERS, as a LIFER that Hooded warbler was to us).

In December and the beginning of January we did discover a male Hooded warbler at the Blue Bay Golf and Beach resort, a bird which did not really like all the attention and of which almost no decent photograph was made.

Fast forward to the end of January 2020. About a week ago we got a surprise notification from Femia about an unknown bird in her bird bath. Imagine our surprise when we saw a gorgeous male Hooded warbler on her pictures. The bird has been visiting her garden for over a week, always at the end of the day to take a quick bath in her bird bath.

The gorgeous little bird is bright yellow with a black ‘hoody’ and belongs to the family of warblers, the small insect eating, never still sitting birds. This year the species decided to overwinter on Curacao as we have been spotting them for weeks in different locations, but never under this magnificent photographing conditions as in Femia’s garden. We had the opportunity to visit Femia’s garden last Friday to see if the bird would show. Not only did the bird show itself, but it took an elaborate bath, giving us the opportunity to shoot this adorable picture.

Hooded warblers breed in the United States and will migrate south in fall.

Hooded Warbler – Monnikszanger – Chipe belo pretu – (Setophaga citrina)