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Colima Warbler | Leiothlypis crissalis
Colimazanger | Reinita de Colima
The Colima Warbler is a large, dull warbler of the mountains of northeastern Mexico, breeding in the United States only in the Chisos Mountains of Big Bend National Park. It is the one American wood-warbler for which most observers must make a climb of several hours; outside that single massif it occurs nowhere in the United States.
Voice
The song is a short, dry trill of about two seconds, often rendered seedle-seedle-seedle-sweet-sweet, with a slightly rising or falling end. It is close to that of Nashville Warbler, but slower and less clear. The call is a sharp, hard chik, louder and lower than in most warblers of this genus. Males sing from the crowns of oaks and pines along the canyon floor, mainly in the early morning from April to June.
Recording: Daniel Lane — CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 · Boot Springs, Chisos Mts, Brewster Co., TX, United States · xeno-canto
Identification
A heavy warbler with a long tail and a grey-brown head and upperparts, passing into warmer brown on flanks and back. The underparts are dingy grey, the rump olive-yellow and the undertail coverts bright yellow — the feature the scientific name refers to. The white eye-ring is narrow but complete and stands out sharply against the drab head. The male has an orange crown patch that stays hidden almost all the time. The sexes are marked alike.
Confusion species
Nashville Warbler is smaller, with a grey head contrasting clearly with a green back, and a bright yellow throat and breast instead of dingy grey underparts. Virginia's Warbler is smaller and greyer, with a yellow patch on the breast and a short tail, and breeds in drier pinyon (a low-growing pine of the dry south-western foothills)-juniper woodland further west. Orange-crowned Warbler lacks the crisp white eye-ring and has faint breast streaking. Within the Chisos Mountains the combination of size, long tail, dingy underparts and yellow undertail coverts is decisive.
Habitat
Moist mountain canyons roughly between 1800 and 2400 metres, with oak, Arizona pine, madrone, juniper and maple, and a dense shrub and herb layer on the canyon floor. In Mexico the equivalent is pine-oak woodland in the Sierra Madre Oriental. The nest is on the ground under an overhanging bank or among leaf litter. Dry low desert slopes are used only on migration; in winter it is in humid pine-oak and montane woodland of southwestern Mexico.
Where the bird is most often found, arranged by the USNVC — the vegetation classification of the United States and Canada — and CMECS for sea and coast.
Range and movements
Breeds in the Chisos Mountains of southwestern Texas and from there patchily through the Sierra Madre Oriental in central Coahuila, Nuevo León and southwestern Tamaulipas to northeastern Zacatecas and northern San Luis Potosí. Birds arrive in Texas in April and leave in August and early September. The winter is spent in southwestern Mexico, from southeastern Sinaloa and Nayarit south through Jalisco, Colima and Michoacán to central Guerrero and east to Morelos. It is thus a short-distance migrant that never leaves the guide area.
- Breeding (summer)
- Winter
- Passage
- dark = core range, pale = thinly spread
Where and when to look
The only reliable site in the United States is Boot Canyon in the Chisos Mountains, reached by the Pinnacles Trail or the Laguna Meadow Trail — reckon on a climb of several hours. Go between mid-April and early June and listen for the dry trill in the early morning; later in the day the song stops and the bird is seldom detected. In the field watch the long tail and the yellow undertail coverts, since head and back colour say little against the light.
Conservation
The species is listed as Least Concern (LC), but the range is small and patchy. Texas holds an estimated fewer than two hundred breeding pairs, with strong variation between years. Drought, canyon fires and rising mountain temperatures act precisely on the moist oak and pine woodland the species depends on. The Mexican part of the range is barely surveyed, so the trend of the world population is unknown. The Texan part lies entirely within a national park, which protects the breeding ground there from clearance.
Scientific name
Leiothlypis crissalis | (Salvin; Godman, 1889)
Salvin and Godman described the species in 1889 as Helminthophila crissalis; because it was later moved to another genus, author and year stand in parentheses. The genus Leiothlypis is from Greek leios 'smooth, plain' and thlypis, a name for a small bird. The species name crissalis derives from crissum, the area around the undertail coverts, after the yellow patch under the tail. The type came from the Sierra Nevada de Colima in Mexico; the species winters there but does not breed there — the name Colima thus points to where the first specimen was found.