Kinglets: Tiny native songbirds with colorful crowns

On an April day in Illinois, a 4-inch-long, bird flits and hovers among the leaves, often camouflaged by the emerging spring leaves. But then it starts singing, and you know what it is. It’s the ruby-crowned kinglet, and its loud, varied, chattering melodic song belies its size. It hovers and flits among the trees, almost looking like a tiny helicopter as it flicks its wings and flutters to snatch a meal. If it’s a male, you might see a flash of its ruby-red feathers atop its head.

Another kinglet species that spends time in Illinois is the golden-crowned, which sings a simple song of four high pitches. It’s a hardier species than the ruby-crown, able to spend time during winter in colder climes. Males and females have golden crowns, but the male also has an orange crown at the center of its gold crown.

Kinglets are tiny, insect-eating birds that migrate through mixed woods and breed in coniferous woodlands. They belong to the family Regulidae, which comes from a Latin word meaning king or prince. They flash their colored crowns to defend feeding or nesting territory or court a female.

The ruby-crowned has olive-green upperparts with two white wing bars, whitish underparts, a broken white eye ring with line extending almost to the base of its bill. Its tail and wings are edged in yellow.

The golden-crowned kinglet sports an olive back, dark wings and two white wing bars with light underparts. It has a patterned face with a dark cheek, white eyebrow stripe and golden crown outline in back. The ruby-crowned kinglet spends winter farther south and breeds farther north than does the golden-crowned. It also arrives later in Illinois in spring migration compared with the golden crown and departs earlier in fall.

Ruby-crowns nest in mixed woods and spruce-fir forests in the northwestern United States and across Canada. Most of them winter in southern and southwestern United States and Mexico. As they migrate through Illinois to nesting or wintering grounds, they’ll choose various habitats, including forests, shrubby areas, parks and even suburbia, in which to feed. Ruby-crowned kinglets typically arrive in early April in central and southern Illinois with five documented at Fort Massac State Park on April 15 a few years ago. One of the latest dates a ruby-crowned has been seen in Illinois during spring migration was on May 22 at Jackson Park in Chicago.

During migration, the ruby crowns may descend to eye level or lower, seemingly tame as they flash their crowns, quibbling and feeding. My sister and I once watched and listened to four males in a face-off, sing-off at Reed Turner Woodland in Lake County one spring just about 4 feet above the ground in a tangle of shrubs.

Last year, when my husband was sitting quietly on a bench beneath our four huge Norway spruces, a ruby-crowned flew and landed right on his nose. Needless to say, no photos were obtained, and my husband remained still until the kinglet flew away.

Golden crowns, which tend to remain higher in the trees than the ruby crowns during migration, start appearing in southern Illinois in late February and early March at places such as Rend Lake and Carlyle Lake. On April 4 one year, 21 golden-crowned kinglets were counted at Kankakee River State Park. A late date for a golden-crowned in northern Illinois would be near the end of April.

Golden-crowned kinglets breed in summer in northern coniferous forests across western and eastern Canada and can be found year-round in northern Minnesota, Wisconsin and Michigan. Though not regular breeders in Illinois, a pair of golden-crowned kinglets successfully fledged young in 1988 and 1989 at the Morton Arboretum in Lisle. Their hanging nest of moss, lichens, twigs and leaves was 45 feet high in a spruce tree.

They winter throughout the United States in various numbers, and can even be found in small numbers in winter in Illinois and as far north as Minnesota and Michigan. That these birds weighing less than an ounce remain in cold, snowy climates throughout winter gives one pause. How do they survive? Biologist Bernd Heinrich found that the golden-crowned kinglets move through the forest in small flocks and must feed constantly throughout the short winter day.

“If kinglets are without food for only one or two hours in the day time, they starve and freeze to death,” Heinrich wrote in his 2009 book, “Winter World: The Ingenuity of Animal Survival.”

Like other birds, kinglets fluff their feathers to trap air and create insulation. But they have other adaptations, for example, the ability to reduce blood flow to the legs to keep them from freezing as well as to lower their body temperature at night to conserve energy. They also huddle in a group, tucking their heads in various ways to create the most warmth.

Heinrich also discovered that golden-crowned kinglets do not sleep in squirrel nests at night as had been hypothesized. Rather they burrow in snow cushions on the undersides of branches.

Golden-crowned kinglets also can get at a lot of food other birds cannot. They are “the only birds that routinely hover at twig ends to pluck off microscopic mites, aphids and aphid eggs that probably no other bird could see, nor a human would ever find,” Heinrich wrote.