Since I’m now living in South Portland, I have to travel a bit farther if I want to view or hear wood warblers.

I can no longer just walk a few blocks to access a location where I can get black-throated green warblers, magnolia warblers, black and white warblers, palm warblers – just some of the birds I had previously been able to see and hear along the University bike path in Orono/Old Town, for example, which had been one of my favorite haunts.

At my old places of residence in Old Town and Orono, I only needed to walk outside to hear – and sometimes see – three or four of these warblers.

However, one warbler seems to be more comfortable among human-altered landscapes. I heard its song on the University of Maine’s Orono campus, as I do now along my jogging path that parallels the ocean: the yellow warbler.

Rivaled in brightness of its plumage perhaps only by the American goldfinch, the yellow warbler is simply beautiful. Its golden plumage is accented by fine chestnut streaks on its chest. On males, the streaking is more pronounced and deeper in color; females have less streaking, and juvenile birds lack it entirely.

I hear this warbler’s song from my apartment as well as when I’m out running. It has been described as sounding as if the bird is saying, “sweet-sweet-sweet, I’m so sweet,” and is sometimes a good identification clue. However, variations on the song have often fooled me, and I was relieved to discover this is often the case with this bird. Its song can often sound like that of other warblers, particularly the chestnut-sided warbler and the magnolia warbler.

Luckily, this small songster is not as hard to spot as are some of the other wood warblers, because of its preference for shrub habitat. Although it most often seeks riparian areas, it will also inhabit shrubby meadows and overgrown fields, as well as people’s gardens. It also seems to strongly associate with habitats dominated by willows.

I was interested to read, in the “Birds of North America,” species account, that this bird will exploit different habitats on small islands off the coast of Maine. Researchers have found it will utilize spruce and mature deciduous habitat there, which is vastly different from its preferences on the mainland.

As I walked along the ocean path late one afternoon, I was rewarded with some excellent close-up views of a yellow warbler as it gleaned a plant’s foliage for insects. I wondered if the shrub it was foraging in was a type of willow; it had long, lance-shaped leaves and clusters of tiny white flowers. This provided a perfect background for this warbler to show of its brilliant plumage – if only I had had my camera with me.

Every so often, the warbler would pause in its hunt for food and sing softly, before darting swiftly forward to snatch some hapless insect from the underside of a leaf, or from within a flower cluster. Sometimes it would vary this method and instead would sally quickly upward to snatch an insect out of the air. At these times it resembled a small leaf being tossed about by the wind.

This warbler, as are most warblers, is a long-distance migrant, wintering in Central America and South America and returning to breed throughout much of the United States (except the southern tier), almost all of Canada, and much of Alaska.

It certainly is abundant and widespread, and for that I am glad.

I may no longer be able to just walk outside to enjoy many of our neotropical migrants, but at least I still have the yellow warbler at my doorstep.

bdnsports@bangordailynews.net