Icterine Warbler
Hippolais icterina
Medium-sized warbler, light olive-brown above and yellowish below. Distinctive features include longish, daggerlike bill, long primary projection in the wings, and square tail. Told from similar Melodious Warbler by usually conspicuous pale wing panel, longer wings, and marginally shorter bill. Usually difficult to see when singing except during song flights, when long wings are apparent. Found in tall forest with oaks and birch, mixed forest, gardens, and parks. Song is fast, loud, and melodious with lots of mimicry.
Identification
A fairly big warbler with a large head, broad-based bill and long wings with a quite short square-ended tail. The upperparts are greyish-green and the underparts are uniformly light yellow. It has pale lores and a rather vague yellowish supercilium with a pale eye ring. Other distinguishing features include a panel on the folded wings formed by pale edges to the secondary feathers and tertiary feathers and the grey, sometimes bluish legs.
Taxonomy
Genus: Hippolais; Family: Acrocephalidae; Order: Passeriformes.
- Scientific name
- Hippolais icterina
- Authority
- (Vieillot, 1817)
- Order
- Passeriformes
- Family
- Acrocephalidae
- Genus
- Hippolais
Range and habitat
The icterine warbler is a bird of woodland rather than forest, preferring woodland edge or glades, favouring the crowns of well-spaced trees with tall undergrowth. It prefers broad-leafed trees, but may be found in conifers mixed with broad-leafed trees. It will use copses, orchards, parks, gardens, shelterbelts and tall hedges interspersed with trees. The icterine warbler has the most northerly and widespread distribution of the four Hippolais species; its breeding range extends from northern France and Norway through most of northern and eastern Europe, south as far as the northern Balkans mountains and Crimea mountains eastwards in a narrowing band to the River Ob. It has bred in Scotland recently but it is normally a passage migrant in Great Britain and Ireland. There is a 2022 record of the Icterine warbler from Gambell, Alaska, and it was also documented in the state the following year.<p>It is a migratory species and the entire population winters in sub-Saharan Africa, mainly south of the equator. It begins its southward migration from late July, peaking in early August and then returns to the breeding range in late May.
- Breeding range
- PAL : c, nc Europe to ec Russia and n Kazakhstan
- Non-breeding range
- s AF
- Migration
- Complete migrants
Behavior
Migration pattern: Complete migrants.
Conservation
Population trend: declining.
- Population trend
- declining
Photos
Distribution
Bird Calls
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