CERULEAN WARBLER
Plate 39
HABITS
This heavenly-blue wood warbler was first introduced to science, figured, and named by Wilson in the first volume of his American Ornithology. Only the male was figured and described from a specimen received from Charles Willson Peale and taken in eastern Pennsylvania. The female was not known until Charles Lucien Bonaparte described it in his continuation of Wilson’s American Ornithology. Strangely enough the discovery of this specimen was also made by a member of the famous Peale family, Titian Peale, the bird having been taken in the same general region, on the banks of the Schuylkill, August 1, 1825. Audubon met with it later, but was almost wholly wrong in what he wrote about it, though his plate is good.
The species is now known to occupy a rather extensive breeding range located mainly west of the Alleghenies and east of the Great Plains from southern Ontario and central New York southward to the northern parts of some of the Gulf States and Texas. It is, however, decidedly local in its distribution over much of this range.
This warbler, a bird of the tree-tops in heavy deciduous woods, where its colors make it difficult to distinguish among the lights and shadows of the lofty foliage and against the blue sky, is well named cerulean! In his notes from central New York, Samuel F. Rathbun writes: “The type of growth to which the cerulean warbler is partial appears to be the rather open forests in the lowlands and often along some stream. During the nesting season, it will not be found to any extent in the better class of hardwood trees of the uplands; in fact, this warbler shows a strong liking for areas where large elms and soft maples and black ash are the dominant trees.” Verdi Burtch wrote to Dr. Chapman (1907) that near Branchport, N. Y., this warbler is “locally abundant in mixed growths of oak and maple with a few birch and hickory.” In other portions of its range, it is found in mixed woods of maples, beech, basswood or linden, elm, sycamore, or oaks. Frank C. Kirkwood (1901) found that, in Maryland, “the species has a decided preference for high open woods clear of underbrush. * * * The trees are principally chestnuts, with oaks, hickorys, tulip trees, etc.”
Spring.—The main migration route of the cerulean warbler is through the Mississippi Valley, from the Alleghenies westward; it is rare in the Atlantic States, especially the more southern ones, and hardly more than casual in Florida and the West Indies. It enters the United States, in Texas and Louisiana, in April, and reaches its breeding grounds in the interior early in May.
Rathbun (MS.) says of the spring migration in central New York: “The cerulean warbler arrives in this region about the middle of May, its coming being announced by its song. With rare exceptions, it is not found in the spring migration with other warblers and it appears to move in very small groups or singly; even in the large springtime movements of warblers known as ‘waves,’ some of the birds of which remain while others pass through the region, I have observed very few cerulean warblers. Not much time elapses after its arrival before mating takes place and nest building begins.”