National Geographic Magazine/Volume 31/Number 4/Friends of Our Forests/Pine Warbler

Pine Warbler (Dendroica vigorsi)


Range: Breeds in Transition and Austral Zones from northern Manitoba, northern Michigan, southern Ontario, southern Quebec, and New Brunswick south to east-central Texas, the Gulf States, and Florida; winters from southern Illinois and coast of Virginia to Florida, eastern Texas, and Tamaulipas.

Few of our birds are so aptly named as the pine warbler, which first, last, and all the time, except in migration, resorts to pine woods. It summers in them in the north and it winters in them in the south. Even its feathers often bear conclusive evidence of its predilection for pines, being often besmeared with their gum. Among its bright-hued relatives the pine warbler cuts but a poor show with its somber green and brown coat, which, at least in Florida, is often dingy and smoke-begrimed from contact with burnt timber.

Though distinctively a warbler and not a creeper, the pine warbler is more deliberate in its motions than most of its kind and, somewhat in the manner of the creeper, moves among the branches or over the trunks in search of its insect food. For a warbler it is an early migrant and reaches the latitude of Massachusetts soon after the middle of April. Indeed, its nest contains eggs or young while the late migrants are still passing north. Its song has little variation, but while monotonous is pleasing and sweet, far sweeter than the trill of the chipping sparrow, which it recalls. Naturally the pine warbler nests in pines, usually rather high up, either on a horizontal limb or among the twigs at the extremity of a limb.

Source: Henry W. Henshaw (April 1917), “Friends of Our Forests”, The National Geographic Magazine 31(4): 318. (Illustration from p. 316.)