Yellow-rumped Warbler painting: Audubon's plate and other classic portraits

About this painting

Shown here: plate 76 of the octavo edition, Yellow-crowned Wood Warbler, the eastern bird with the white throat. The male perches on the stem of a blue flag iris, the plant his text names for plate 153, Iris versicolor, and a young bird sits on a twig below. The octavo gives the western bird a plate of its own, 77, Audubon's Wood-Warbler.

Audubon’s Yellow-rumped Warbler: plate 153, “Yellow-crown Warbler”

During a winter in the Floridas, Audubon saw these warblers every day. They skipped along the piazzas, hovered at the sides of houses for spiders, dived among cabbage leaves after worms and roosted at night in the orange groves. On warm mornings he watched flocks fly out to sea until they were out of sight and come back about an hour later, a sign to him that they migrate by day. In Maine in early May, “the skirts of the woods seemed alive with them.”

Their winter food, he found, was mostly berries, above all myrtle and pokeweed, and they let a person come within a few feet. A single tweet at every move was enough for him to pick one out among a dozen warblers.

Plate 395 brought the western bird. John Kirk Townsend found it on the Columbia River and, Audubon wrote, “has done me the honour of naming it after me.” He drew the male and female from Townsend's specimens and could point to almost no difference from the eastern bird but the throat, yellow instead of white. Townsend's western birds had been hard to get: in Philadelphia, self-styled friends of science objected to his even seeing them, and he could buy duplicates only if the names he and Thomas Nuttall chose were published under Townsend's name.

Story: Audubon, Ornithological Biography, vol. 2 (1834), pp. 303–306; vol. 4 (1838), pp. xi–xii; vol. 5 (1839), pp. 52–54. See plate 153 free at Audubon.org. See plate 395 free at Audubon.org.

More classic portraits, free to see

• John James Audubon, The Birds of America, octavo edition (1840–44): plate 76: “Yellow-crowned Wood Warbler” (the painting shown above); plate 77: “Audubon's Wood-Warbler”. (Free scans: New York Public Library Digital Collections)
• Louis Agassiz Fuertes, for Elon H. Eaton’s Birds of New York (1910–14), plate 94: “Myrtle Warbler”, with 4 other birds. Free scan (Internet Archive)

About the Yellow-rumped Warbler

• Two forms that look different make up the species: the eastern Myrtle Warbler, with a white throat, and the western Audubon's Warbler, with a yellow throat. (Source: National Audubon Society)
• It can winter farther north than most warblers because it can digest the wax coating on berries such as bayberry and wax myrtle. (Source: National Audubon Society)

How long does a Yellow-rumped Warbler live?

For the Yellow-rumped Warbler, we found no typical lifespan in a wildlife agency's guide that we could confirm. The oldest known wild Yellow-rumped Warbler was at least 10 years old (USGS Bird Banding Laboratory): it was banded in Wyoming in 1998 and found there again in 2006.

Source: USGS Bird Banding Laboratory. A banding record is the minimum age of one bird when it was found again, not a typical lifespan. How long do wild birds live?

How can you tell if a plate 153 print is an original?

By its size: an original plate 153 is a hand-colored sheet about 26 by 38 inches; the Yellow-rumped Warbler’s octavo versions, plates 76 and 77, are book-size, from 1840–44. Many prints sold today are reproductions: how to tell an original from a reproduction. Plate 153 and the other 434 also come bound in one modern book: which Birds of America book to buy.