This week for Flora and Fauna Friday we’re glancing up at our ever present warbler of the evergreens, the Pine Warbler (Setophaga pinus).
From year to year and season to season no other warbler is so consistent a sight and sound as the Pine Warbler. Throughout the Deep South and in every corner of South Carolina pines abound. And in them, Pine Warblers are found. Large for a warbler, male Pine Warblers glow with lemon-yellow from beak to breast, fading to straw-yellow in winter and grading to a dingy shade towards the tail. Females shroud themselves in that same dingy straw yellow year-round. Dull steel-blue wings bear two strong wing-bars of white. A light eyebrow, dark eye-stripe, broken eye-ring, and dull, darkened cheek faintly mark their faces. The song of the Pine Warbler is simple, one to two-dozen sharp and upward notes trilled in quick succession. Yet, subtly inconsistent in its pitch and varied in rate from bird to bird. This inconsistency helps separate their song from the similar sounding Worm-eating Warbler (Helmitheros vermivorum) and Chipping Sparrow (Spizella passerina). The Pine Warbler’s call is a single “chet” note, harsh in tone with a sucking ring and the faint bass of a bigger warbler.
Just as its namesake pines remain a static and verdant fixture of our landscape, the Pine Warbler’s place in the Palmetto State is equally constant. Yet, their behavior and diet fluctuates with the seasons. In winter, they forage the treetops both above and beyond the savannas, feasting on any arthropods they can find alongside the pine seeds they pluck and the occasional fruit. In spring, they descend readily from the pines to scavenge fields and fencerows for waking insects and to collect pine straw, incessantly singing all the while. In summer, they continue their singing as they raise their young within the pineywoods, who’ll soon leave the nest to curiously and clumsily explore the wide world of pines. In fall, they fall silent as they fatten up for winter, using their mouths to eat rather than to sing for once. Despite this seasonal cycle, throughout the year Pine Warblers are always here, shifting about the pines, as surely as shadow hang beneath their needles.
