VIRGINIA’S WARBLER
Plate 18
HABITS
This warbler was discovered by Dr. W. W. Anderson, at Fort Burgwyn, New Mexico, and was described by Baird, in a footnote in The Birds of North America, by Baird, Cassin, and Lawrence (1860). The footnote occurs under the explanation of plates in the second volume. The warbler was named for Mrs. Virginia Anderson, wife of the discoverer.
Its range during the breeding season covers portions of Nevada, Utah, Colorado, Arizona, and New Mexico, mainly in the mountain regions, and it retires to Mexico for the winter. It seems to be more abundant in Colorado than elsewhere, breeding from the foothills, where it is a characteristic bird and perhaps the most abundant of the wood warblers, up to 7,500 to 8,000 feet in the mountains. On the spring migration, it is abundant along the valley streams, among the cottonwoods and willows, or sometimes among the pines; but in the summer it is found among the low scrub oak brush on the hillsides.
Bailey and Niedrach (1938) write attractively of Virginia’s warbler in its Colorado haunts:
In the broken prairie where the yellow pines have taken their stand upon the crest of the tableland, and in the rocky canyons clothed with the scraggly scrub oaks slipping down to narrow grass-grown creek-bottoms, Virginia’s Warbler chooses its nesting grounds.
Plants seem to burst into life during the early weeks in May. * * * The flowers of the scrub oaks tinge the hillsides with a greenish-yellow bloom; the green of bursting leaves and grasses soon blends with the nodding blossoms of the pasque-flower; the beautiful pink plume sways on the hillside, and yellow blossoms of the Oregon grape thrust forth among the holly-like leaves, making one think of flowering Christmas wreaths. It is then that the Virginia’s Warblers are at the height of their activity. Their colors are the grays and yellows of the new vegetation. The males perch among scrub-oak branches and yellow pines, where they are usually concealed, and do their utmost to outsing their towhee neighbors.
In Nevada, Ridgway (1877) first observed this warbler “among the cedar and piñon groves on the eastern slope of the Ruby Mountains. * * * On the Wasatch and Uintah Mountains it was more abundant, being particularly plentiful among the scrub-oaks on the foothills near Salt Lake City. They lived entirely among the bushes, which there were so dense that the birds were difficult to obtain, even when shot.”