Nashville Warbler

About the Nashville Warbler

A neat little warbler with a gray hood, bold white eyering, and yellow underparts - like it dressed in the dark and still got it right. The rufous crown patch that gives the species its scientific name stays hidden unless the bird is agitated, which, being a warbler in migration, it often is.

Nashville Warblers move through Central Texas in good numbers each April-May and again in September-October, and they are kinder to observers than most of their family: they work brushy edges and low second growth rather than the treetops, often at eye level. That makes them a photographer's kind of warbler.

The name is an accident of history - Alexander Wilson first described one from Nashville in 1811, where the bird was merely passing through, as it does here. It breeds in cool bogs and young forests across two widely separated ranges, one in the Northeast and Canada, one in the mountain West.

Watch for the complete white eyering on a plain gray head; nothing else that moves through our brush in migration combines that face with a yellow throat.