New World warblers | Parulidae

Amerikaanse zangers | Reinitas

Small, short-billed insect-eaters of the foliage, nine to fifteen centimetres long and seldom heavier than fifteen grams. They work a crown methodically, picking caterpillars and aphids from the undersides of leaves, hanging at a twig tip or taking an insect in a short sally. The plumage is what makes the family notorious: in spring the males carry sharply bounded blocks of yellow, black, blue, orange or chestnut, and after the autumn moult male, female and young bird all stand there greenish and vaguely marked, so that an autumn bird has to be named on a handful of details — undertail coverts, leg colour, wingbars, the rump. Nearly all of them migrate, some for thousands of kilometres and a few straight across the Gulf of Mexico or the Atlantic, in a body of ten grams. Despite the name they have nothing to do with the warblers of Europe: they are placed in a family of their own, confined to the Americas.