Voice of the Wild

This is Illinois Extension’s Voice of the Wild. Our birdsong will start in five seconds, so find someplace quiet, take a deep breath, and enjoy.

This bird is an early migrant and it often serenades the spring ephemerals from the tops of sycamores. It likes the tall trees of the bottomlands and its song is clear and graceful even when heard from the trail far below. It has a black triangular mask, but the bright yellow of its throat is its most striking feature; so bright and so yellow it looks like someone’s taken a highlighter to it.
This is the Yellow-throated warbler, Setophaga dominica from the family of wood warblers, Parulidae. Let's hear that graceful, descending song again.

Thank you to the Macaulay library at the Cornell lab of Ornithology for our bird sounds. And thank you for tuning in to learn a new bird call with Illinois Extension.