Called also: BLUE YELLOW-BACKED WARBLER; [NORTHERN PARULA, AOU
1998]
Length -- 4.5 to 4.75 inches. About an inch and a half shorter
than the English sparrow.
Male and Female -- Slate-colored above, with a greenish-yellow or
bronze patch in the middle of the back. Chin, throat, and
breast yellow. A black, bluish, or rufous band across the
breast, usually lacking in female. Underneath white, sometimes
marked with rufous on sides, but these markings are variable.
Wings have two white patches; outer tail feathers have white
patch near the end.
Range -- Eastern North America. Winters from Florida southward.
Migrations -- April. October. Summer resident.
Through an open window of an apartment in the very heart of New York City, a
parula warbler flew this spring of 1897, surely the daintiest, most
exquisitely beautiful bird visitor that ever voluntarily lodged between two
brick walls.
A number of such airy, tiny beauties flitting about among the blossoms of the
shrubbery on a bright May morning and swaying on the slenderest branches with
their inimitable grace, is a sight that the memory should retain into old age.
They seem the very embodiment of life, joy, beauty, grace; of everything
lovely that birds by any possibility could be. Apparently they are wafted
about the garden; they fly with no more effort than a dainty lifting of the
wings, as if to catch the breeze, that seems to lift them as it might a bunch
of thistledown. They go through a great variety of charming posturings as they
hunt for their food upon the blossoms and tender fresh twigs, now creeping
like a nuthatch along the bark and peering into the crevices, now gracefully
swaying and balancing like a goldfinch upon a slender, pendent stem. One
little sprite pauses in its hunt for the insects to raise its pretty head and
trill a short and wiry song.
But the parula warbler does not remain long about the gardens and orchards,
though it will not forsake us altogether for the Canadian forests, where most
of its relatives pass the summer. It retreats only to the woods near the
water, if may be, or to just as close a counterpart of a swampy southern
woods, where the Spanish or Usnea "moss" drapes itself over the cypresses, as
it can find here at the north. Its rarely [found,] beautiful nest, that hangs
suspended from a slender branch very much like the Baltimore oriole's, is so
woven and festooned with this moss that its concealment is perfect.
BLACK-THROATED BLUE WARBLER (Dendroica caerulescens) Wood Warbler
family
Length -- 5.30 inches. About an inch shorter than the English
sparrow.
Male -- Slate-color, not blue above; lightest on forehead and
darkest on lower back. Wings and tail edged with bluish.
Cheeks, chin, throat, upper breast, and sides black. Breast and
underneath white. White spots on wings, and a little white on
tail.
Female -- Olive-green above; underneath soiled yellow. Wing-spots
inconspicuous. Tail generally has a faint bluish tinge.
Range -- Eastern North America, from Labrador to tropics, where
It winters.
Migrations -- May. September. Usually a migrant only in the
United States.
Whoever looks for this beautifully marked warbler among the bluebirds, will
wish that the man who named him had possessed a truer eye for color. But if
the name so illy fits the bright slate-colored male, how grieved must be his
little
olive-and-yellow mate to answer to the name of black-throated blue warbler
when she has neither a black throat nor a blue feather! It is not easy to
distinguish her as she flits about the twigs and leaves of the garden in May
or early autumn, except as she is seen in company with her husband, whose name
she has taken with him for better or for worse. The white spot on the wings
should always be looked for to positively identify this bird.
Before flying up to a twig to peck off the insects, the birds have a pretty
vireo trick of cocking their heads on one side to investigate the quantity
hidden underneath the leaves. They seem less nervous and more deliberate than
many of their restless family.
Most warblers go over the Canada border to nest, but there are many records of
the nests of this species in the Alleghanies as far south as Georgia, in the
Catskills, in Connecticut, northern Minnesota and Michigan. Laurel thickets
and moist undergrowth of woods in the United States, and more commonly pine
woods in Canada, are the favorite nesting haunts. A sharp zip, zip, like some
midsummer insect's noise, is the bird's call-note, but its love-song, zee,
zee, zee, or twee, twea, twea-e-e, as one authority writes it, is only rarely
heard in the migrations. It is a languid, drawling little strain, with an
upward slide that is easily drowned in the full bird chorus of May.