Northern Parula

 The northern parula is a small American wood warbler. In mixed flocks they are usually one of the smallest birds with kinglets typically being the only smaller species. They breed in the eastern United States and southeastern Canada. They winter in southern Florida, Caribbean, and Central America.

 The northern parula breed primarily in forested habitat. The build pendulum styled nest from hanging vegetation. Birds in the north tend to use beard moss or coniferous twigs for nest construction while southern populations tend to use Spanish moss. In the middle, the southern Great Lakes region, northern parula do not breed. It is possible that this is because most of the habitat in these areas lack of epiphytes, plants that grow on other plants, that they look for to build the nests.

These birds were all photographed during migration. The top two were photographed near my home in southern Minnesota in May. Northern parula only nest in north eastern Minnesota where there are a lot of boggy areas that have trees with moss growing on them. The bottom shot was taken on South Padre Island in Texas. Northern parula do nest in east Texas but not usually that far south. This little water fountain was a first stop for many birds after making the long flight across the Gulf of Mexico.

Northern Parula

The northern parula is a small warbler that is found in the eastern half of North America. There is a gap in their range through a good portion of the Midwest (Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, northern Illinois, and northern Ohio) It is theorized that they perhaps existed in this area but because of the loss of necessary habitat they no longer nest there. They nest in vegetation hanging from trees. In the Canadian portion of their range they typically nest in old man's beard lichen which hangs from the trees. The southern U.S. population nests primarily in Spanish Moss. During the winter they migrate down to the southern tip of Florida, the Caribbean, Mexico, and Central America. Here in Minnesota they do nest in the northeast portion of the state where we still have some bogs. This bird was photographed during spring migration.

Crosby Warblers

This May I have spent a lot of time photographing warblers. The late spring helped to hold off the trees from leafing out which gave me some spectacular views at warblers that stopped on their way migrating north. One of the places that has been good for spotting warblers in Crosby Farm Park. Usually I spend a lot of my time at Crosby around the boardwalk that leads through the wetlands. Last year I got some great shots of American toads calling at this location.
When looking for warblers however, trees are important habitat. So I decided to head out on the trail that follows the river on the south side of the wetlands. Many of the trails were still wet or full of mud due to the flooding of the Mississippi River. Fortunately we are near enough to the beginning of the Mississippi so our troubles were not as severe as they are currently experiencing down south.
I found numerous warblers on my couple of visits to Crosby. The most common warbler that I saw was the yellow-rump warbler. Yellow-rumps are usually the first warblers that we see in the spring and the last that we see each fall because they do not migrate as far south as the other warblers. Because of the weather and lack of leaves it was not difficult to find the warblers the hard part of photographing them was separating the other warblers out from the yellow-rump, which were about 95% of the warblers that I saw.
I saw many different types of warblers besides yellow-rumps such as Nashville and yellows. Both of these types are easy to catch your eye because of their bright yellow color but you have to be careful to look closely because sometimes you can get lucky and find one of the more fancy yellow warblers like the Magnolia warbler above.
Northern parula are not as colorful as the magnolia but I was very happy to have the chance to photograph one. As you may know, if you are a frequent visitor to Ecobirder, I do not count a bird to my life list until I have an identifiable picture. I guess that means I can now add northern parula to my list.
While I have photographed bay-breasted warblers before this picture that I took at Crosby turned out better then any that I have taken in the past. I was lucky on this occasion too because the skies clouded up, which made taking pictures pretty difficult, with in an hour of me arriving at the park. Right before the clouds took over the sky this bay breasted flashed a quick peak for the camera. Besides those pictured I also saw yellow warblers, American redstart, black and white, blackpoll, Blackburnian, Tenessee, and palm warblers.