northeast-flora-and-fauna

Here's a fairly well-known bird that I don't often get a picture of: the Yellow-rumped Warbler . You can actually see their famous yellow rump in the second picture. These birds mostly visit us in the winter, taking advantage of our (relatively) balmy winters (compared to their breeding range that can go pretty far north into Canada). The Yellow-rumped Warbler may not be a species soon , and this gets to the heart of what we consider a species to be. Prior to 1973 our eastern population of Yellow-rumped Warblers was called Myrtle Warblers [1], and another western population was called Audubon Warblers [2]. But then it was discovered that these 2 populations were interbreeding very readily in one range overlapping area, and so in 1973 they were grouped together into 1 species, the Yellow-rumped Warbler. But ornithologists have continued to study these birds, and have concluded that while the birds in the overlapping range have a mix of DNA between the eastern/western populations...