Life History
The breeding male Blue-winged Warbler is unmistakable. It is yellow above and below. The wings are gray with two white bars, and there is a black eye stripe. Females are duller, but otherwise similar.
The breeding habitat is open scrubby areas. Blue-winged Warblers nest on the ground or low in a bush, laying 4-7 eggs in a cup nest.
These birds feed on insects, and spiders.
The song is a series of buzzing notes. The call is a sharp chip.
This species forms two distinctive hybrids with Golden-winged Warbler. The commoner, genetically dominant Brewster's Warbler is gray above and whitish (male) or yellow (female) below. It has a black eye stripe and two white wing bars.
The rarer recessive Lawrence's Warbler has a male plumage which is green and yellow above and yellow below, with white wing bars and the same face pattern as male Golden-winged. The female is gray above and whitish below with two yellow wing bars and the same face pattern as female Golden-winged.
Read more about this topic: Blue-winged Warbler
Famous quotes containing the words life and/or history:
“Only those who know the supremacy of the intellectual life ... can understand the grief of one who falls from that serene activity into the absorbing soul-wasting struggle with worldly annoyances.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)
“All history attests that man has subjected woman to his will, used her as a means to promote his selfish gratification, to minister to his sensual pleasures, to be instrumental in promoting his comfort; but never has he desired to elevate her to that rank she was created to fill. He has done all he could to debase and enslave her mind; and now he looks triumphantly on the ruin he has wrought, and say, the being he has thus deeply injured is his inferior.”
—Sarah M. Grimke (1792–1873)