Figure 282. The Cerulean Warbler is among the rarest eastern warblers recorded in California. This first-fall female was banded on Southeast Farallon Island on 23 October 1981 (1986-394; Roger Stone).

 

 

 

 

 

 

CERULEAN WARBLER Dendroica cerulea (Wilson, 1810)

Accepted: 15 (71%)	Treated in Appendix H: yes
Not accepted: 6	CBRC review: all records
Not submitted/reviewed: 1	Large color image: see Figure

This compact warbler breeds in a patchy distribution east of the Great Plains. The northern breeding limit extends from central Minnesota east to Vermont and probably southern New Hampshire, and northward into southern Ontario and southwestern Quebec. The southernmost breeders are found in eastern Oklahoma, southern Arkansas, and northern Georgia (and formerly northeastern Texas; Dunn and Garrett 1997). Migration takes place primarily through the Caribbean and along the Atlantic slope of Middle America to wintering grounds located in northern South America. The species occurs casually during fall in southern Canada, from Newfoundland (where a bird present on 2 December 1995 provided the latest autumnal record north of the tropics; FN 50:143) to southwestern Manitoba. There is a mere smattering of records to the West across Colorado, New Mexico, southeastern Arizona, southern Nevada, and northern Baja California. The species is accidental in Iceland (Práinsson 1997).

California’s first Cerulean Warbler was a first-fall male collected on 1 October 1947 at Red Hill, Salton Sea, Imperial County (Hanna and Cardiff 1947). Fall vagrants, with bracketing dates of 2 September and 27 October, account for two-thirds of California’s records (10 of 15), and spring vagrants, with bracketing dates of 17 May and 6 June, make up the rest. As these numbers suggest, the Cerulean has always ranked among the rarest of the eastern wood-warblers found to occur in the West, but its detection rate from 1974 to 1981 (1.0/year) sizzles in comparison with the rate from 1982 to 1997 (0.4/year), and not a single record was reviewed from 1998 to 2003 (but see Appendix H). The Cerulean Warbler’s dwindling rate of vagrancy to California is consistent with serious declines in this species’ populations linked to habitat loss and degradation on both the breeding and wintering grounds (Robbins et al. 1992; see also the summary by Hamel 2000).

At least three claims of the Cerulean Warbler from California, including one from Morongo Valley in San Bernardino County cited by Small (1994), were found to involve first-fall female Blackburnians (Lehman 1987, Patten 1995). This underappreciated identification problem was addressed by Lehman (1987) and Dunn and Garrett (1997).

¹On the review list 1972–1976