I don’t know if it’s the lure of the city or a religious conviction, but the town of Waynesville has a rather uncommon summer resident this year. A yellow-throated warbler has apparently taken up residence at Grace Episcopal Church. It can be heard regularly singing from a large white pine at the entrance to the church along North Haywood Street.

The yellow-throated warbler is generally thought of as an interior forest species more common from riparian habitats, but also found in drier situations. It is usually associated with mature forests of pine, oak, sycamore, and cypress. It is often found high in the canopy, where it creeps along the limbs and trunks of large trees looking for insects. The yellow-throated is known locally, in Indiana, as the “sycamore” warbler because of its preference for this tree, common along the rivers of that state.

Like most neotropicals, this species is in decline due to loss of habitat in its nesting and wintering grounds. The yellow-throated nests from northern Florida to New Jersey, west to Illinois, Ohio, and Texas. It is occasionally found as far north as New York and New England.

It winters from coastal South Carolina and Georgia to the Gulf states and southward to Costa Rica. I have found yellow-throateds singing in South Carolina’s Francis Marion National Forest in January.

The yellow-throated is a large warbler reaching a total length of five and a half inches. It is grey above with two white wing-bars. The male has black cheeks and a black crown, which are greyish in the female. Both sexes have white eyebrows, yellow throats and upper breasts with black stripes along the sides, and white bellies.

In the southern states, this warbler is particularly fond of live oaks and cypress where it likes to build its nest in clumps of Spanish moss. Northern and interior nesters often use pines. They build nests of grass, bark, and caterpillar silk lined with feathers and down. The nests are usually on horizontal limbs 20 to 50 feet above the ground.

The female lays four greenish eggs, heavily marked with reddish brown and/or purple. Incubation is generally a couple of weeks. Yellow-throated warblers are thought to produce two broods a year.

While yellow-throateds are fairly common around Western North Carolina, they are generally absent from the higher elevations. They are found more commonly below 2,500 feet.

Two blocks from downtown Waynesville is certainly the most urban setting in which I’ve ever encountered yellow-throated warblers. I have found them near human habitation but in more natural or wooded settings. I have seen them during nesting season at the Nantahala Outdoor Center’s outpost on the Nolichucky and at the Sugarland’s Visitor Center in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

Bob Olthoff mentioned he had heard the bird at the Episcopal church when we were doing the “Birding for the Arts” program on May 12. We stopped by and the yellow-throated was there. Now, when I get to the office early (which is way too often), I always linger a while outside and listen for the “tear, tear, tear, tew-tew-tew, tew-wi.” The song starts with clear slurred notes that drop in pitch, followed by rapid notes, and ends on a rising note.

I wait to hear it mixed in with songs from house finches, robins, cardinals, and the rantings and ravings of the starlings. As of last Saturday (June 2), it was still singing from that same large white pine.

(Don Hendershot can be reached at don@smokymountainnews.com)

 

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