Wildlife Watching Wednesday: The Protective Yellow Warbler
By: Tom Berg
Yellow warblers are one of many small songbirds that fly south for the winter and migrate back through North America in the springtime. They breed and raise their young throughout much of the United States and almost all of Canada during the spring and summer.
As the name implies, theses brightly colored warblers are adorned with brilliant yellow feathers, and the males can be distinguished by the reddish-chestnut colored streaks on their breast. Females are a little duller and lack the breast streaking. Their dark beak and coal-black eyes are easily noticed against their plain yellow head.
Yellow warblers are insect eaters, so you are very unlikely see them at your back yard bird feeders. f you have trees in your yard, however, they might be seen flitting from branch to branch in the upper reaches of the trees, picking off caterpillars, ants, beetles and other insects from the branches and leaves. They even fly and catch some insects in mid-air.
Like many warblers, a large percentage of yellow warblers migrate north in the springtime and head straight to Canada. But many of them stay and build their nests in the northern two-thirds of the USA. They often choose nest sites along rivers or wetlands, where trees like willows and tangled thickets are common. Their nests are very soft and cozy, since they are often lined with stray feathers, tufts of animal fur, and fluffy plant material like dandelion seeds and cattail seeds.
An interesting fact about yellow warblers is that they don’t tolerate it when a brown-headed cowbird lays an egg in their nest. Unlike other birds which raise the cowbird hatchling as its own, yellow warblers abandon the nest even if the mother warbler has already laid her own eggs in it. She then builds a new nest right on top of the old one and lays a new clutch of eggs. Cowbirds never return to check on their eggs or hatchlings, so the new warbler nest stays cowbird-free!
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