CANADA WARBLER Wilsonia canadensis (Linnaeus, 1766)

Accepted: 19 (100%)	Treated in Appendix H: no
Not accepted: 0	CBRC review: records from 1972 through 1978
Not submitted/reviewed: NA	Color image: none

This warbler’s northern breeding limit extends from extreme southeastern Yukon east to the Maritime Provinces. The southern limit reaches from northern Minnesota and eastern Ohio east to New England and south through the Appalachian Mts. to northern Georgia. The species migrates along the Atlantic slope of Middle America to winter in northern South America, rarely north to Costa Rica. Transients occur casually to rarely in the southern Northwest Territories, Newfoundland, Bermuda, the southern Atlantic coast, and the northern West Indies. The species occurs casually across the West, primarily along the Pacific coast between southwestern British Columbia and northern Baja California Sur. Extralimital records extend to northern Alaska, Clipperton Atoll, the southern West Indies, Greenland, Iceland, and Ireland (Hanafin 2006).

Since California’s first well-documented record of the Canada Warbler, involving a female collected on 13 June 1967 in the Panamint Mountains of Inyo County (LACM 65978, Northern 1968), the state has accrued more than 250 records. Roughly nine out of every ten Canada Warblers found in California is a fall vagrant (8 August–21 November, peaking in September), and coastal records strongly predominate at this season. Spring vagrants (21 May–29 June, peaking in early June) account for nearly all of the remaining records. A first-year female present from 27 December 2002 to 10 February 2003 in San Francisco, San Francisco County (NAB 57:254), furnished the first winter record of a Canada Warbler north of Costa Rica. As recently as 1998 this species was placed on a short list of warblers considered unlikely to winter in California (NAB 52:254)!