| Photos: The male Townsend's Warbler
Dendroica townsendi was at the Carmel River mouth, Monterey County,
California, on 24 Sep 2005. W. Ed Harper photographed the
Blackburnian Warbler D. fusca on 3 May 1993 at Pt. Pelee,
and Ed also photographed the male Cape May Warbler
D. tigrina was at Ft. Jefferson in the Dry Tortugas, Florida, in May
2002. The handheld Northern Parula
Parula americana and Chestnut-sided Warbler
D. pensylvanica was on S.E. Farallon I. on 20 June 1977 (Ron LeValley
snapped this shot of me holding the birds with my camera). The imm. Prothonotary
Warbler Protonotaria citrea was at Death Valley Nat'l Park,
Inyo Co., California on 11 Oct 1997. The male Black-throated
Blue Warbler D. caerulescens was eating figs in a Carmel
backyard on 13 Nov 1994 in Monterey Co., California. The female Red-breasted
Chat Granatellus venustus was at Concordia, Sinaloa, Mexico,
on 24 Feb 1987. The male St. Lucia Warbler
D. delicata was on St. Lucia, Lesser Antilles, in March 2000. The Collared
Redstart Myioborus torquatus
was at Cerro Punta, Chiriqui,
Panama, in Jan 1981. The "Myrtle" Yellow-rumped Warbler
D. coronata was photographed on 29 Jan 2005 in Monterey, California.
The remaining warblers were in by backyard in Pacific Grove, California:
he "Audubon's" Yellow-rumped Warbler
D. coronata auduboni was shot 16 Apr 2005; and the Hermit
Warbler D. occidentalis, Orange-crowned
Warbler Vermivora celata, and male Wilson's
Warbler Wilsonia pusilla were all photographed on 26
Apr 2005. All photos © 2003 Don Roberson, except
the Blackburnian & Cape May Warblers © W. Ed Harper, used with
permission; all rights reserved. |
| Bibliographic note
There are actually quite a few books that cover most of the New World
warblers. Few include the entire family — with its Neotropical and/or Caribbean
representatives — and therefore there are few actual "family books" per
se. But those listed here cover all the basic North American breeding species
and attempt, in general, to provide a family portrait:
Family book: Rating 
Curson, Jon, 1994. Warblers of the Americas: an Identification Guide.
Houghton Mifflin, Boston.
This is only true "family book" in that it covers the 116 species
of Parulidae recognized by the author (including a couple recently extinct
ones), and includes color plates (by David Quinn and David Beadle) of all
the species. This effort strongly resembles a Pica Press family book with
plates in one location with facing text, and the main text elsewhere. Like
all these generic family books, it bogs down in detailed plumage descriptions
which fail to answer the 'big picture' of how to separate the difficult
ones. I owned this book for several years but became disillusioned with
it, since it rarely had the answers to 'state-of-the-art' questions. The
author was up on much of the literature, and did (for example), cite Pyle
& Henderson's (1990) paper on identification of Oporornis, but
— inevitably — it had to summarize those topics, and thus lost the fine
details actually needed. In almost all situations, I found it necessary
to go to the primary papers. On a more general level, the overview of the
family was okay, and the plates adequate (but not enticing), and I eventually
sold the book.
The value of this book decreased significantly with
the publication of Dunn & Garrett (1997), acknowledged experts on North
American species. It didn't help that Warblers of the Americas was
written and illustrated by British collaborators. No doubt they did a lot
of research, but I never felt they knew American birds to trust
what they said.
Family book: Rating 
Dunn, Jon, and Kimball Garrett. 1997. A Field Guide to the Warblers
of North America. Houghton Mifflin, Boston.
This book covers only North American warblers (but includes
Baja California and Mexican vagrants that have crossed the U.S. border);
it is thus not a true "family" book. At 60 species is has just over half
of the family. Yet that half is covered exceptionally well from the perspective
of identification, distribution, subspecific variation, and migration.
The authors, renowned experts in field identification, discuss the range
of variation in each species, and identify the obvious — and not so obvious
— pitfalls. At the moment, this book is definitive on most major i.d. topics,
including a full discussion of voice. The authors give special attention
to detailed information on ageing and sexing each warbler. I give it high
marks in these areas.
That having been said, the sections of behavior
and habitat and other biological topics are short, and the main text suffers
from a lack of citations. This is an identification and distribution
guide, not a more generalized survey of all that is known about warblers.
It is also an odd size for a family book, having field guide dimensions
(rendering all the paintings and photos quite small) but being very thick.
Surely no one will carry it in the field; it is presumably meant for the
car. But I prefer my family books on shelves at home, and this odd small-and-thick
shape is not conducive to easy use. The paintings (by Thomas Schultz and
Cindy House) range from excellent to okay, and I appreciated the scattering
of color photos throughout. Yet in many cases I still wanted better illustrations
of particularly difficult points. The detailed range maps for the U.S.
and Canada, though, are excellent.
Family book: Rating
Harrison, Hal H. 1984. Wood Warblers' World. Simon & Schuster,
New York.
In many respects, this is the opposite approach to presenting
North American warblers (53 species here) from Dunn & Garrett (1997).
This book's emphasis is on breeding biology, habitat, life history, and
such matters, with only the briefest of remarks on identification, subspecific
variation, or detailed distributional information. At the level of biology,
the text is all-too-brief and the bibliography rather short, but it is
entertainingly written. The style is anecdotal — even when citing serious
studies — and we get the feeling that the author really enjoys warblers.
He is inclined to opine on most anything, from why the name "Worm-eating
Warbler" is a poor one to why campground locations in Perdenales State
Park, Texas, are poor. But the book is packed with a lot of the author's
photos — mostly of warblers on the nest — plus a variety of black-and-white
habitat shots. These are evocative and in some cases quite wonderfully,
recalling the fabulous series of wood-warbler nesting photos published
by Eliot Porter.
Family book: Rating 
Griscom, L., and A. Sprunt, Jr., eds. 1957; rev ed. 1979. The Warblers
of North America. Devin-Adair Co., New York.
This was the first major review of North American warblers.
Now quite dated, it provided a mid-20th-century overview of distribution,
migration, and life history, accompanied by paintings of John H. Dick and
others. Some of the paintings were nice, and again some anecdotes remain
poignant, but time has passed this one by.
There is yet another recent book, Douglas Morse's (1989) The American
Warblers, that I have not seen. It has a comprehensive review of the
behavior and ecology of wood-warblers, and comes highly recommended by
Dunn & Garrett (1997). Although it apparently does not deal with identification,
distribution, or vagrancy, it may be the best text on other topics.
Literature cited:
Pyle, P., and P. Henderson. 1990. On separating female and
immature Oporornis in fall. Birding 22:222-229.
Roberson, D. 2002. Monterey Birds, 2d ed. Monterey Pen. Audubon Soc.,
Carmel, CA.
Sibley, C. G., and J. E. Ahlquist. 1990. Phylogeny and Classification
of Birds: A Study in Molecular Evolution. Yale Univ. Press, New Haven,
CT.
|
All
North American warblers are migratory to some greater or lesser extent,
which means than all are possible vagrants outside their normal range and
migration routes. I live in California, and the search for vagrant warblers
— particularly vagrant eastern warblers in spring and fall migrations —
is the highlight of the birding year.
Despite
our parochial interest in the North American breeding species of New World
warblers, often termed "parulids," this group likely arose in the Neotropics,
and over half of the species reside primarily south of the United States
and Canada. The parulids are nine-primaried, primarily insectivorous songbirds
that are closely related to the Emberizids and such groups as tanagers
(Thraupidae) or icterids (Icteridae). Biochemical evidence suggest they
are a relatively recent radiation, and Sibley & Ahlquist (1990) lumped
them all together in a single giant Emberizidae family, with the various
groups assigned to subfamilies. Here, though, I follow the Handbook
of the Birds of the World and the A.O.U. Check-list in considering
the parulids as forming their own family.
Nevertheless,
it is North American warblers that I know best, and recently I have been
working on trying to get better photos with a digital camera. This Yellow-rumped
Warbler (right) was actually digiscoped, and came out remarkably well.
It shows the characteristic yellow rump patch for which the bird is named.
Locally, the colloquialism is "butter-butt," and that is how they are often
pointed out in the field: "there's a butter-butt over there." Like many
Dendroica warblers, they have tail spots on the inner web of the outer
rectrices; these can be seen in this shot. This particular Yellow-rumped
is of the eastern race, a group we call "Myrtle Warbler." It commonly
winters throughout the United States, but in California tends to be restricted
in winter to willow and cottonwoods groves. It used to be considered a
separate species from western populations, which were known as "Audubon's
Warbler." Myrtle has a white throat; Audubon's has a yellow throat. There
is a narrow area of hybridization and integradation where the breeding
ranges meet in British Columbia, but we almost never see hybrids in the
field and the two taxa separate out distinctly in wintering habitats. I
suspect they will be split again someday.
