04/18/2026
Prothonotary Warblers are back in the area for nesting! A group of citizen scientists, master naturalists and various Audubon chapters in Kansas and Missouri, and Pittsburg State University researchers in Kansas provide nesting boxes for the birds and study their migration patterns You can help us!
If you are birding and see a Prothonotary Warbler with brightly colored leg bands, please take a photo of the bird and/or make note of the placement of the colors of the bands and contact me (or respond to this post). For example, this bird has green over silver bands on his left leg and red over white bands on his right leg. With this color and placement combination, we know this bird is Ferrous, a bird that nested in an iron pipe behind Schlagle Library at Wyandotte County Lake Park.
We currently have 161 Prothonotary Warblers banded in eastern Kansas and western Missouri. 69 of them have brightly colored bands, and 92 have only silver bands (Federal bands). Those with silver bands were banded as nestlings when their age and size could safely accommodate banding.
Ten of the birds with brightly colored bands also carry a barometric pressure geolocator. Prothonotary Warblers are too small to carry Motus tags, so we use a tiny geolocator to track their migration. We will need to recapture these birds to remove the geolocator and download the valuable migration data from previous years, because the geolocators do not transmit data to us.
If you see a Prothonotary Warbler without bands, please report it to eBird. We use eBird reports to determine placement of future nesting boxes.
Thank you for your keen eyes and your assistance. We share our data with NestWatch - Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Delta Audubon in Louisiana and Mississippi, and researchers at Louisiana State University (LSU) for research purposes.
Photo credit to David Martin. Photo was taken at Wyandotte County Lake Park in Kansas.
