48 Shades of Yellow, or How I Arrived at a Jaundiced World-View

May 11, 2021 Examiner Media

By Brian Kluepfel

I am woefully behind the times, so much so that when humankind goes extinct, the news will take five or six years to reach me, somewhere on a Peruvian mountaintop watching the last DVD player in the world (but it will be solar-powered).

Speaking of DVD players, in our house we’re watching the three-disc set of Shetland, a detective series set in – aren’t they clever? – the Shetland Islands, about halfway between the northern tip of Scotland and Norway.

We birders (the royal we, I think in this case) were delighted when Episode Two featured a strange old man and his pet raven. But imagine our surprise when Episode Three’s plot centered around a team of ornithologists studying the bird life on Fair Isle (part of the Shetland archipelago). And with subtitles on to account for the Scottish burrs, we even managed to follow the plot.

Basically, in this episode there’s a lot of sexual and academic sex going on among the scientific team, running amok on Fair Island like a pack of bonobos in Gore-Tex. When a murder happens (they always do, in this show) one guy uses this excuse: he slept outside overnight near the cliffs in hopes of spotting some vagrant icterine warblers. He tells the detectives that not only did he see these rare birds in the dawning light, but he also happened to drop his suspicious backpack off the cliffs and into the ocean below. (Quick, what rhymes with pants on fire, class?)

Okay, so we know cheaters never prosper, so you can guess what eventually happens to this mendacious scientist. But I was struck by his clever alibi and looked up the icterine warbler. The show’s researchers did well. The bird does exist.

Hippolais icterina is a migratory warbler, breeding as far north as Norway and making its wintering grounds in sub-Saharan Africa, sometimes below the equator. It does pass through Britain and Ireland on its migration path, and sometimes breeds in Scotland, though not often. In 2009, two pairs of breeding “ickies” represented just the fourth and fifth national records of the species. So the writers of Shetland got it right. Bravo, boys and girls!

Now, icterus – the word comes from icterina, or the Greek word for jaundice – whose victims assume a rather yellowish-green hue. Jaundice generally means something is messed up with your liver or biliary tract. Nasty business. There’s too much bilirubin – not to be confused with Billy Connolly, a famous Scotsman – in your blood, and bilirubin is yellow-orange in color. You sort of turn into an off-tone Oompa Loompa.

The bird, however, is pretty as a picture and we assume most don’t have liver disease.

This took me on my next leap down the internet rabbit hole, where the various hues of yellow were listed – 48 in total. So the icterine warbler is, if we were to take a rather jaundiced view of the world, just another yellow warbler!

But I suppose the point here is that ornithologists make strange bedfellows, and you should never lie about seeing rare species, because if eBird doesn’t catch you, surely Detective Inspector Jimmy Perez will.

Brian Kluepfel is a correspondent for Lonely Planet guidebooks, traveling the Americas in search of rare birds and tasty street food. He’s a member of Saw Mill River Audubon and strongly encourages you to join them in their many activities involving the preservation and appreciation of our natural world, particularly in Westchester County. You can see many shades of yellow warblers here now on their migratory or nesting missions. Portions of this column appeared previously on www.birdmanwalking.com.