The Status and Occurrence of Black-throated Blue Warbler (Setophaga caerulescens) in British Columbia
by Rick Toochin
Read the full article with photos on our Vagrant Birds page.
Introduction and Distribution
The Black-throated Blue Warbler (Setophaga caerulescens) is a beautiful passerine that is common in eastern North America. This species is found breeding in eastern Canada from southern Ontario, across southern Quebec through New Brunswick and Nova Scotia (Curson et al. 1994, Dunn and Garrett 1997). There have been isolated breeding pairs found in Manitoba and eastern Saskatchewan (Dunn and Garrett 1997). In the eastern United States, the Black-throated Blue Warbler is found breeding from north eastern Minnesota (where it is scarce), northern Wisconsin, northern Michigan to New England south to Connecticut, and south through the Appalachian Mountains and the adjacent mountains of New York south to northern Georgia (Curson et al. 1994, Dunn and Garrett 1997). This species migrates mostly from the Appalachian Mountains east through Florida with a few scattered reports from the Great Plains states south to Texas and Louisiana with more reports coming from these outlying areas in the fall than the spring (Dunn and Garrett 1997).
The Black-throated Blue Warbler winters mainly in the Bahamas and the Greater Antilles of the western Caribbean with small numbers wintering in Florida (Curson et al. 1994, Dunn and Garrett 1997). This species winters casually in Bermuda and the Lesser Antilles with small numbers of birds wintering along the Caribbean Coast of Mexico from Veracruz and the eastern Yucatan Peninsula south to Panama and into South America in Columbia and Venezuela (Curson et al. 1994, Dunn and Garrett 1997). The Black-throated Blue Warbler has turned up once as an accidental vagrant in the fall to Belcher Island in the Northwest Territories (Dunn and Garrett 1997). This species is a rarity throughout the mid-states and Alberta (Dunn and Garrett 1997).
Along the west coast the Black-throated Blue Warbler is a regular migrant only in California where there are over 700 records with over 95% of them turning up in the fall into early winter (Hamilton et al. 2007). It is not a review species of the California Bird Records Committee (Hamilton et al. 2007). In Oregon, the Black-throated Blue Warbler is no longer on the state review list by the Oregon Bird Records Committee as there are twenty-five accepted records (OFO 2012). In Washington State, there are nine accepted records by the Washington Bird Records Committee (Wahl et al. 2005, WBRC 2012). In British Columbia, the Black-throated Blue Warbler is a casually occurring species with twenty-six Provincial records (Toochin et al. 2013d, see Table 1). There is one late fall record for Juneau Alaska (Gibson et al. 2003). The species is an accidental vagrant to Greenland, Iceland, and the Azores (Lewington et al. 1992, Alfrey 2006, Rodebrand 2012).
