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Grace's Warbler
The Grace's Warbler, Dendroica graciae, a small perching bird, is a species of New World warbler.
The Grace's warbler was discovered by Dr. Elliott Coues in the Rocky Mountains in 1864. Coues chose to name the new species of warbler after his 18-year-old sister, Grace Darling Coues, and his request was honored when Spencer Fullerton Baird described the species to science in 1865.
The Grace's warbler is a small bird, growing to 11-13 cm in length. It is mostly gray on top, with broken black streaks across the back and flanks and two white bars on the wings. The throat and breast are a bright and vibrant yellow, and it has a yellow half-eye ring under the eye and a long yellow "eyebrow" stripe that starts at the base of the beak and runs above the eye, fading to white after it passes the eye. The rest of the Grace's warblers underparts are white.
Grace's warblers are locally common in open mixed pine-oak woodlands above 2,000 m (7,000 feet). Grace's warblers summer in the south-western United States and northern Mexico and will migrate into Central America for the winter, traveling as far south as Nicaragua.
The nesting habits of Grace's warblers are largely unknown, as nests are very rarely found. The nest is a compact cup of plant fibers, the inside lined with hair and feathers, placed high above ground on a tree branch, usually pine. The female lays 3 to 5 white or cream-colored eggs, speckled with brown, and ringed at the larger end.
Like the vast majority of warblers the Grace's warbler is totally insectivorious, and will often use a hovering mode of flight to inspect pine cones for insect larvae.