Poplar Warbler

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Poplar Warbler
Male of the poplar warbler (Setophaga cerulea)

Male of the poplar warbler ( Setophaga cerulea )

Systematics
Order : Passerines (Passeriformes)
Subordination : Songbirds (passeri)
Superfamily : Passeroidea
Family : Wood Warbler (Parulidae)
Genre : Wood Warbler ( Setophaga )
Type : Poplar Warbler
Scientific name
Setophaga cerulea
( Wilson , 1810)

The poplar wood warbler ( Setophaga cerulea , syn .: Dendroica cerulea ) is a small species of bird from the family of the New World common wood warbler (Parulidae). Its highly fragmented breeding area is in eastern North America and extends south from the Great Lakes to Arkansas . It winters in the west of northern South America from Colombia and Venezuela to Peru and Bolivia .

description

The poplar wood warbler is a very small wood warbler, and with a body length of 11.5 cm is about the size of a blue tit . However, it is slimmer and with a weight of 8-10.5 g lighter than these. The wings are relatively long and pointed, the tail quite short with long under tail-coverts . The species has nine hand wings and nine arm wings (including umbrella feathers ); the tail consists of twelve control feathers . The beak is blackish in males and lightened lead-gray at the base of the mandible, in females it is dark with a brownish base of the mandible. The iris is brown to reddish brown. Legs and feet are blackish in adult birds, brownish in juvenile dress. The plumage of males and females differs significantly.

The upper side of adult males shows a dark sky blue that extends on the head to the ear covers. The vertex can be inconspicuously dark dashed or have traces of dark vertex side stripes. The center of the head is usually the most vividly colored blue. Some individuals show a whitish stripe over the eyes . The back is roughly dark dashed, the upper tail-coverts have dark feather centers. The underside is predominantly white from the chin, throat, lower beard strip and sides of the neck. A dark gray, bluish gray or blue band runs across the chest below the throat. The flanks are roughly dark blue-gray or blackish striped. The small arm covers are bluish. The middle and large arm covers are blackish with blue-gray lines on the outer flags. They have extensive white tips that form two conspicuous white bands on the folded wing. The wings are blackish to sepia-colored and the outer flag is lined with medium to light blue. The umbrella feathers have a wide blue-gray border with a white lace border. The medium-gray control springs are narrowly lined with blue-gray with white subterminal fields on the inner vane of the outer five pairs.

Female poplar warblers have gray to green upper side plumage. On the white underside plumage there are lighter stripes on the flanks than on the males.

Distribution area

The heavily fragmented distribution area of ​​the poplar wood warbler is mainly in the temperate zone of eastern North America south of the Great Lakes .

It extends from central Minnesota , northern Wisconsin and the central Lower Peninsula of Michigan , southern Ontario , New York , Connecticut and Rhode Island south through northwestern New Jersey , Pennsylvania , the far north of Delaware , north and west Maryland, and the mountainous regions of the western Virginia , western North Carolina, and the far north Georgia . Westward, it extends into southeastern Arkansas , Missouri, and eastern and central Iowa .

There are also isolated occurrences in the extreme south of Québec , in central Massachusetts eastward to eastern Virginia and North Carolina, south to northern Alabama , southern Arkansas and possibly northern Mississippi . Westward the species occurs in the far east of Oklahoma , in Kansas , Nebraska and possibly in the southeast of South Dakota . Further breeding occurrences could exist in northern Louisiana and in the extreme northwest of South Carolina .

A 2001 study identified a number of areas with significant breeding populations that are of outstanding value for the conservation of the species:

hikes

The poplar wood warbler is a medium to long-distance migrant that completely clears its breeding areas in the winter months. He winters in northwestern South America and crosses the Gulf of Mexico by train . The autumn migration sometimes begins in late July, but can drag on for more than four months. The spring migration lasts about two months, with most of the birds arriving in the breeding areas between late March and mid-April.

The wintering areas in the mountain forests of northern South America are in Colombia on both sides of the Cordillera Central , in Venezuela , Ecuador and Peru on the eastern slopes of the same. In Bolivia , the species is regularly found in small numbers north of the Yungas and in the eastern tepuis of Venezuela, on the western slope of the Andes in Ecuador and the wooded foothills up to the southeast of Brazil , it is an irregular winter visitor. She was also found in January in the lowlands of Costa Rica near the Pacific and as a single overwinter on Grand Cayman .

habitat

The poplar warbler prefers to colonize large, contiguous deciduous forests with tall, old wood stocks of bitter nut and American white oak . A well-structured tree layer with smaller openings in the canopy and also a well-structured upper shrub layer are important.

There is a clear dichotomy in the altitude distribution: the species occurs both in the lowlands of river valleys and in moderately moist mountain forests at over 500 m above sea level. In between it is missing.

In addition to bitter nut and white oak were Magnolia acuminata , silver maple and King Nut ( Carya laciniosa ) and ash maple , pecan , Celtis laevigata , Sweet Gum and Ulmus americana identified as nesting trees or preferably visited in search of food. Red oak and red maple , on the other hand, are largely avoided.

Even if the species occurs locally in smaller forest areas of only 10 hectares, it seems to be very sensitive to the increasing fragmentation of larger forest areas elsewhere. Possibly this is less due to habitat preferences, but rather to other influences that go hand in hand with the fragmentation of the habitat - for example greater parasitization by the brown-headed cowbird or a higher risk of predation .

Systematics

The species used to be in the genus Dendroica along with about 30 other wood warblers . However, studies of mitochondrial and nuclear DNA revealed that the genus is polyphyletic . As a result, the were hooded warbler ( Wilsonia citrina ), the American Redstart ( Setophaga ruticilla ), the Warbler ( Parula americana ) and the elves warbler ( Parula pitiayumi ) incorporated in the genus and according to the rule of priority the oldest name Setophaga for the newly defined genre with now 37 species used.

Others

The poplar wood singer is a central theme in the 2010 novel Freiheit by the American writer Jonathan Franzen as the favorite bird of the nature conservationist Walter Berglund, who works for Nature Conservancy .

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Buehler et al. (2013), sections Distinguishing Characteristics and Appearance , see literature
  2. ↑ a b c Buehler et al. (2013), section Distribution , see literature
  3. ↑ Rohrbaugh et al. (2001), referenced in the IUCN Redlist, see web links
  4. ↑ Buehler et al. (2013), Migration section , see literature
  5. ↑ a b c d Buehler et al. (2013), Habitat section , see literature
  6. ↑ Irby J. Lovette, Jorge L. Pérez-Emán, John P. Sullivan, Richard C. Banks, Isabella Fiorentino, Sergio Córdoba-Córdoba, María Echeverry-Galvis, F. Keith Barker, Kevin J. Burns, John Klicka, Scott M. Lanyon, Eldredge Bermingham: A comprehensive multilocus phylogeny for the wood-warblers and a revised classification of the Parulidae (Aves) , Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution 57 (2010), doi : 10.1016 / j.ympev.2010.07.018 , p. 753-770

Web links

Commons : Setophaga cerulea  - Collection of images, videos and audio files