Vancouver’sJericho Park was covered with warblers this afternoon, but try as I might, I couldn’t find anything other than Yellow-rumps.
That’s an insidious “but,” of course, suggesting as it does that Yellow-rumped Warbler is somehow lesser than the other possible parulids. It is indeed much more abundant than any other, but that doesn’t make this species any less interesting. Or these species.
The birding world is abuzz with anticipation of a re-split of the yellow-rumped warblers, which were lumped almost 40 years ago in the great taxonomic massacre of the 1973 AOU Supplement. Now the Check-list Committee is evaluating a proposal to recognize at least two separate species in Dendroica coronata as now construed (and to correct the genus name to Setophaga–but that’s another story).
Both white-throated Myrtle Warblers and yellow-throated Audubon’s Warblers breed in British Columbia, and both are common migrants here in the Vancouver area, with the latter taxon generally the more abundant. Apparent hybrids and intergrades are easy to find if you look; one bird this afternoon had the yellow throat of an Audubon’s and the white malars and reduced white on the greater coverts of a Myrtle–I’m not sure I ever heard it chip, unfortunately.
The AOU Committee doesn’t much care what a birder wants, but still I hope for the split. And if it comes, I think we’ll all start paying attention again to what have for too long been “just yellow-rumps.”
