Tennessee Warbler

About the Tennessee Warbler

The Tennessee Warbler is a plain, cleanly marked warbler: gray head, olive back, whitish underparts, and a sharp pale eyebrow over a fine, pointed bill. Fall birds are washed with yellow. It has no wing bars, no streaks, no tail spots - elegance by subtraction.

It is another spruce-budworm bird, booming in numbers when the caterpillar cycles peak in the boreal forest. The song is loud for so small a bird, a dry, accelerating three-part chipping. In migration and winter, Tennessee Warblers feed heavily at flowering trees, taking nectar as well as insects.

Texas sees them in numbers in both spring and fall, statewide but heaviest in the east and along the coast, wherever blooms and insects concentrate.