The female palm warbler lays four to five eggs, but both parents will stay busy collecting insects once the young hatch. They build their nests in the thickets surrounding the many bogs along the edges of the great coniferous forests of this region of Canada. This warbler is one of the northernmost breeding warblers, spending the summer months in the boreal forests of Canada. On occasion, individual palm warblers choose to remain in northeast Tennessee, southwest Virginia or western North Carolina during the winter months.Įvery spring, however, palm warblers make a long migration flight north. Some of them do not even migrate that far, choosing to remain along the Gulf and Atlantic coastlines of the southern United States. Palm warblers do seek out warmer domains during the winter months, including the islands of the Caribbean. Gmelin based his naming of the bird based on the fact that a specimen had been collected on Hispaniola, an island in the Caribbean with an abundance of palm trees.Įarly naturalist and painter John James Audubon painted these palm warblers. Johann Friedrich Gmelin, a German naturalist who lived from 1748 to 1804, saddled the palm warbler with its inappropriate name.
Throughout most of its life, the palm warbler doesn’t even encounter palm trees. The palm warbler’s name is, at best, a misnomer. The resemblance of the patch to a pat of butter is uncanny enough to have encouraged birders to nickname this often abundant winter warbler the “butter butt.” The yellow-rumped warbler has a most suitable name thanks to the yellow patch of feathers on the bird’s rump. In fact, the yellow-rumped warbler is one of the few warblers that routinely spends the winter months in the region.
These two warblers, which look rather brownish and nondescript in the fall, pass through the region later than most other migrating warblers. On a recent bird walk at Sycamore Shoals State Historic Park in Elizabethton, Tennessee, I helped locate a flock of 13 palm warblers and a single yellow-rumped warbler. The warbler parade that begins each autumn with such brightly colored migrants as Blackburnian warbler, black-throated blue warbler and magnolia warbler usually ends with some of the less vibrant members of this family of New World birds. Photo by Jean Potter The palm warbler’s name is a mistaken assumption that this warbler held special affinity for palm trees.