National Geographic Magazine/Volume 31/Number 4/Friends of Our Forests/Orange-crowned Warbler

Orange-crowned Warbler (Vermivora celata celata)


Range: Breeds in lower Hudsonian and Canadian Zones from Kobuk River, Alaska, southeast to central Keewatin and Manitoba, and south locally in the Rocky Mountains to New Mexico; winters in the Gulf and South Atlantic States to South Carolina and south through Mexico to Mount Orizaba.

The orange-crowned warbler is much better known as a migrant, especially a fall migrant, than as a summer resident. Its summer home, in fact, is so far north that it is beyond the ken of most observers, although the bird occasionally summers, and no doubt nests, in Maine and Wisconsin. Seton found it a common summer resident in Manitoba; Kennicott discovered it nesting about the Great Slave Lake among clumps of low bushes; while Nelson found it common in summer in the wooded regions of northern Alaska. For some reason or other of late years the orange-crown seems to be a much commoner migrant in Massachusetts, and perhaps generally in New England, than formerly, and the sight of three or four in a day occasions no great surprise. It winters in Florida and in other of the South Atlantic States, and the cause of its rarity in the Eastern States in spring is due to the fact that it migrates up the Mississippi Valley. The orange-crown is one of the most plainly colored of the warbler tribe, and there is little about it to attract the notice of the casual observer. The song is said to consist of a few sweet trills, and, as is the case with the ditties of so many of its kind, has been likened to that of the familiar little “chippy.”

Source: Henry W. Henshaw (April 1917), “Friends of Our Forests”, The National Geographic Magazine 31(4): 306. (Illustration from p. 308.)