Tennessee Warbler (Vermivora peregrina)

County List:

Rule:

Forested or Mixed Forested/Nonforested Landscapes

      Bog
      or Treed Bog

Habitat List:

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Literature:

Habitat: The preferred habitat in Michigan, as in Ontario, is coniferous forest bog dominated by somewhat park-like stands of black spruce, usually mixed with scattered tamarack and northern white cedar and sometimes with birch, poplar, and alder. The forest floor is covered with a dense mat of sphagnum moss, grass hummocks, and small northern shrubs, such as Labrador tea. Less often this warbler inhabits open shrub wetland of alders and willows along shallow streams. Singing males have been noted also in wet, mesic, and dry mixed forests, but whether or not they breed is unknown. In Ontario, a few nest in habitats as dry as jack-pine plantations. The only two described Michigan nests were concealed in hollows in sphagnum hummocks overgrown with fine grasses and shaded by Labrador tea and bunchberry.

Habitat: Associated with openings in northern deciduous or mixed woodlands with grasses, dense shrubs, and scattered clumps of young deciduous trees. Often in boggy areas, occasionally on dry pine lands.

Special Habitat Requirements: Brushy, semi-open country.

The Tennessee Warbler goes through population cycles: it often becomes very numerous during population explosions of the spruce budworm, a favored food.

Habitat: Deciduous and mixed forests; in migration, groves, brush. Breeds in bogs, swamps, and forests. Prefers openings in second-growth balsam-tamarack bogs, aspen and pine woods, or edges of dense spruce forest. Nests near slight depressions of boggy ground. During spring migration, mostly high in trees. During fall migration, often lower in saplings, brush, weedy fields.

Diet: Mostly insects, some berries and nectar. In summer, feeds mainly on insects, including caterpillars, scale insects, aphids, beetles, flies, ants, and leafhoppers; also spiders. Takes nectar from catkins and some juice from grapes.

Nest: Concealed in a depression on ground under bushes or overhanging grass. Site is usually on mossy hummock in a wet area, but will nest on fairly dry ground on steep hillsides. Nest is open cup made of thin grass stems; lined with fine dry grass, porcupine quills, or moose hair.