Since back to northwest Montana, I have once again been treated the to presence of the Nashville Warbler. They are an explosion of color and voice. The gray head with its brilliant white eye-ring contrasts the olive back and yellow throat, chest, and belly. Its song always starts with a series of double notes.
The Nashville Warbler is split into 2 subspecies populations, which were once treated as separate species. The eastern population represents the nominate ruficapilla subspecies whose breeding range across middle and eastern Canada and northern tier of the eastern United States. It more white in the belly and vent area. The western ridgwayi, which was treated as a full species as Calaveras Warbler, occupies a patchy breeding distribution along the Pacific and Sierra and Cascade Mountains, across south British Columbia, through northern Idaho and northwestern Montana. It is more yellow and bobs its tail, which the eastern Nashville never does.
Walking the Kim Williams Trail, which starts at the M parking lot at the University of Montana and parallels the Clark Fork River, you can easily find several of these colorful songsters singing from the chokecherries or from atop the adjacent ponderosa pines.
