Blue-winged Warbler

The Blue-winged Warbler is a bright, cleanly patterned bird, with a vivid yellow head and underparts contrasting against blue-gray wings marked with two crisp white wingbars. A thin black line runs through the eye, giving the plain yellow face a subtle but distinctive mark, and the back is a yellow-olive tone that blends into the head color.

It is the closest relative of the Golden-winged Warbler, and the two species hybridize readily where their ranges overlap, a zone that has expanded as Blue-winged Warblers have spread northward and eastward, in some areas at the expense of Golden-winged Warbler populations.

Key field marks

• Bright yellow head and underparts
• Blue-gray wings with two white wingbars
• Thin black eyeline through an otherwise plain yellow face
• Olive-yellow back

Similar species

Golden-winged Warbler is the closest relative; it shows gray (not yellow) underparts, a black throat/mask rather than a thin eyeline, and a yellow wing patch rather than white wingbars. Hybrid "Brewster's" and "Lawrence's" Warblers show mixed combinations of both parent species' features and can complicate identification where the two overlap.

Blue-winged Warblers breed in shrubby old fields, overgrown pastures, forest edges, and other early-successional habitats across the eastern and midwestern United States, with a range that has expanded northward and eastward in recent decades, increasingly overlapping with Golden-winged Warbler.

They winter in Central America, favoring similarly shrubby forest edge and second-growth habitat.

Behavior and voice

Blue-winged Warblers forage much like Golden-winged Warbler, often probing into curled dead leaf clusters for caterpillars and other insects, in addition to gleaning from foliage more generally.

The song is a simple, buzzy two-note phrase, often described as an insect-like "bee-buzzz," with a higher first note dropping into a lower buzzy second note.

Nesting

The nest is built on or near the ground in dense grass or shrub cover, made of grass, bark strips, and dead leaves. Clutches typically contain 4-6 eggs.