National Geographic Magazine/Volume 31/Number 4/Friends of Our Forests/Red-faced Warbler

Red-faced Warbler (Cardellina rubrifrons)


Range: Mainly in Transition Zone in mountains of southern Arizona and southwestern New Mexico and south through Mexico to the highlands of Guatemala.

So differently colored from our own North American warblers generally is the little red-face that one might at once suspect it to be a stranger from a strange land. So at least it seemed to me when, in the mountains near Apache, Arizona, in July, 1874, I saw the first one ever detected within our borders. Later in the same year I found others on Mount Graham. It is a Mexican species which has obtained a foothold along our southern borders in Arizona and New Mexico. As I noted at the time, I saw flocks of ten or fifteen among the pines and spruces, the birds frequenting these trees almost exclusively, only rarely being seen on the bushes that fringed the stream. In habits red-faced warblers are a rather strange compound, now resembling the common warblers, again recalling the redstart, but more often, perhaps, bringing to mind the less graceful motions of the familiar titmice. Their favorite hunting places appear to be the extremities of the limbs of spruces, over the branches of which they quickly pass, with a peculiar and constant sidewise jerk of the tail. Since 1874 other observers have had a better chance to study the bird and a number of nests have been taken. These were under tufts of grass, and in the case of one found by Price was “such a poor attempt at nest-building and made of such loose material that it crumbled to fragments on being removed.”

Source: Henry W. Henshaw (April 1917), “Friends of Our Forests”, The National Geographic Magazine 31(4): 304. (Illustration from p. 305.)