Pine Warbler

About the Pine Warbler

The pine warbler (Setophaga pinus) is a small songbird of the New World warbler family Parulidae. It is a permanent resident in the southeastern United States and also breeds in southeastern Canada and the northeastern United States, where it is migratory. Unlike other wood-warblers, in addition to insects the pine warbler also sometimes consumes seeds.

The pine warbler was formally described in 1766 by the Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus in the twelfth edition of his Systema Naturae under the binomial name Certhia pinus. Linnaeus based his entry on the "pine-creeper" that had been described and illustrated by the English naturalists Mark Catesby in 1731 and George Edwards in 1760. Edwards had doubts as to whether his specimen was the same species as illustrated by Catesby and included as a footnote "On a stricter examination I think it a species different from Catesby's". Edwards' etching actually depicted a blue-winged warbler so that Linnaeus's name applied to two different species. This led to considerable instability in the nomenclature which was only resolved when in 2009 a new binomial name, Vermivora cyanoptera, was proposed by Storrs L. Olson and James L. Reveal... Wikipedia →