Today the female Kirtland’s Warbler named ‘Sexy’, weighing in at about 1/2 ounce, may be regarded as the species saving matriarch. Her story unfolds in dreamy romantic fashion. She, like all lady Kirtland’s, did not sing. But each spring and fall she migrated from her exclusive Michigan nesting grounds to winter somewhere in the Bahamas. She acqiured her formal name - 61-24179 - on June 22, 1970. That’s when Larry Walkinshaw banded her. Sexy and Company appeared in print in Bird Watcher’s Digest in 1979, a reprint of the original appearing in the Jack-Pine Warbler the year before.

Banding Kirtland’s and other species offered opportunity to study family lineages, just as we chronicle our genealogies. Walkinshaw was able to capture and identify enough of them to document three generations before concluding work on them in 1983. He was then eighty-years old.

‘Sexy’ was part of the Kirtland’s population when only 167 pairs remained. During this lowest ebb in Kirtland’s numbers, Walkinshaw was the only one officials would allow banding them. Since ‘Sexy’ and her daughters, even a few granddaghters, produced almost twice as many fledglings each of eight seasons as her contemporaries, their impact upon recovery was profound. This becomes especially vivid upon considering the compounding affects as if approaching exponential population increase of her linage.