As our friends at Cornell say, the Yellow Warbler is “a splash of yellow in a patch of willow.” This phrase makes us all the happier to share a photo by Keith Williams of a Yellow Warbler on a willow branch in the Yukon Terrifory. This little bit of sunshine spends its winters in Central America and northern South America, and makes quite a trip to North America to breed. While the bird spreads throughout the continent, in the Pacific Flyway these birds end up in the Pacific Northwest, Oregon, Washington, Canada, and Alaska. While a great many of the birds do breed in California, the numbers are way off of historical numbers due to the loss of the kind of streamside habitat (including riparian willow) that these birds prefer. A lot of Audubon California’s work in the Central Valley with farmers has been aimed at bringing back more of this habitat, and thus the Yellow Warbler. If you look at the eBird maps below, you can see that this has been a big month for the Yellow Warbler in California as these birds spread northward.This is how the eBird maps looked at the end of March. A few Yellow Warblers, but not too many:

And this is how they look now, on April 29: