Chestnut-sided Warbler

About the Chestnut-sided Warbler

The spring male Chestnut-sided Warbler is one of the sharpest-dressed warblers in North America - lime-yellow crown, black face markings, clean white underparts, and the rich chestnut streak down each flank that names the bird. Fall birds trade the pattern for lime-green upperparts, a gray face with a neat white eye-ring, and often just a whisper of chestnut.

It forages with its tail characteristically cocked and wings slightly drooped, hopping along twigs and inspecting leaf undersides for caterpillars and other insects. The full song is a bright, emphatic "pleased, pleased, pleased to MEETCHA." A bird of brushy second growth, it actually benefited from the regrowing forests of the northeast and was far rarer in Audubon's day than it is now.

In Texas the Chestnut-sided Warbler is a spring and fall migrant, common some days on the coast in late April and May and a solid find inland through Central Texas, where migrants pause in lakeside willows and oak mottes.