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Northern Parula | Setophaga americana
Brilparulazanger | Parula norteña
The Northern Parula is one of the smallest warblers in the region: blue-grey with a yellow throat and a green back patch. It forages actively among leaves and twigs on the outside of the canopy, sometimes hanging upside down like a chickadee. In winter it is one of the commonest migrant warblers on the northern islands.
Voice
The call is a sharp tsip. The song, also heard on the islands in spring, is a buzzy, rising trill ending with a short, sharp accent: zzzzzzzzee-yup.
Recording: Mario Reyes Jr — CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 · converted to mono · xeno-canto
Identification
11–12 cm, with a short tail. Blue-grey above, with a yellow-green patch in the middle of the back, two white wing bars and white arcs above and below the eye. Throat and breast are yellow, the belly white; the lower mandible is yellow. The male has a breast band of blue-black and rufous; in the female it is absent or faint. Young birds are greener above and show less contrast.
Confusion species
Tropical Parula Setophaga pitiayumi, a resident on Trinidad and Tobago, lacks the white eye-arcs; the male has a dark mask, and the yellow extends further onto the belly, with no breast band. Cerulean Warbler Setophaga cerulea has a white throat. Small size, yellow throat, eye-arcs and green back patch identify Northern Parula.
Habitat
Almost any woodland: dry and moist broadleaf forest, coastal woodland, mangroves, pine forest, shade-coffee plantations and gardens and parks with trees. It searches the canopy and outer branches for insects and spiders, often in mixed flocks.
Where the bird is most at home, classified by the vegetation types of the Caribbean.
Range and movements
A common winter visitor in the Bahamas, the Turks and Caicos Islands, Cuba, the Cayman Islands, Jamaica, Hispaniola (Haiti and the Dominican Republic), Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands. Fairly common in the northern Lesser Antilles, scarcer further south; rare on Trinidad and Tobago and the ABC Islands. Breeds in eastern North America, from south-eastern Canada to the Gulf Coast, and winters from Florida and eastern Mexico through Central America to the Caribbean.
- Resident
- Summer visitor (c. Oct–Mar)
- Winter visitor (c. Apr–Sep)
- Passage (Mar–Apr, Oct–Nov)
- dark = core range, pale = thinly spread
How and when to look
In winter in almost any woodland or garden with trees on the northern islands, often together with other warblers. In spring the rising, buzzy song is the quickest clue.
Conservation status
Not threatened. The population is large and stable to slightly increasing. On the breeding grounds it nests in beard lichen and Spanish moss; where air pollution has removed these, the parula has disappeared locally as well.
Scientific name
Setophaga americana | (Linnaeus, 1758)
Linnaeus described the species in 1758 as Parus americanus; because it was later moved to another genus, the author and year stand in brackets. The genus Setophaga was introduced in 1827 by Swainson. Setophaga is Greek, from sēs, sētos 'moth' and -phagos '-eating': 'moth-eater'. americana is Latin for 'American', after its range in North America. The specimen the first description was based on came from South Carolina, United States.