Blue-winged Warbler

About the Blue-winged Warbler

The Blue-winged Warbler is a small golden bird with a sharp black eye-line, blue-gray wings crossed by two white bars, and a song that sounds like a tiny inhale-exhale: a dry, buzzy "beee-buzzz", first note rising, second falling. It is a bird of shrubby old fields and forest edges - country halfway between meadow and woods.

It forages actively in brush and low trees, frequently hanging upside down like a chickadee to probe curled dead leaves, a favorite trick shared with its close relatives. Caterpillars, spiders, and other soft-bodied insects make up nearly all the diet.

The species is one half of the most famous hybrid story in American ornithology: where its range meets the Golden-winged Warbler's, the two interbreed so freely that the hybrids earned their own names - the "Brewster's" and rarer "Lawrence's" warblers - and the genetics of the pair have been studied for over a century. Blue-winged has generally been the expanding species, its advance one of the pressures on the declining Golden-winged.

In Texas the Blue-winged Warbler is a migrant, commonest in spring along the coast and through the eastern half of the state, where fallout days can put these golden sprites at eye level in the oak mottes. Fall passage is earlier and quieter, mostly August and September.