The Lower Mississippi River Sections of the USA across to Georgia and North to Maryland was the original range of the Bachman's Warbler......Another victim of our taming of America................By the dawn of World War 2, the "yellow songbird" of our bottomland forests was off the map and silenced forever

  Bachman's warbler (Vermivora bachmanii), a small yellow songbird of the southeastern United States, has not been seen for decades.  John James Audubon painted a pair of these birds without ever having seen them alive.  The species was discovered in 1833 by his close friend, John Bachman (Blaugrund and Stebbins 1993).  Audubon's painting was based on specimens sent to him by Bachman.  He depicted the Bachman's warbler posed stiffly on a Franklinia tree (Franklinia altamaha), an equally mysterious species with large white flowers.  Discovered in the South in 1765 by the noted botanists William and John Bartram, this beautiful tree was named in honor of Benjamin Franklin (Blaugrund and Stebbins 1993).  In spite of thorough searches in the area in Georgia where the tree was found, the Franklinia was never seen in the wild again (Blaugrund and Stebbins 1993).  Fortunately, the Bartrams had taken cuttings of the tree for cultivation, and this tree is now grown in botanical gardens and nurseries throughout the world.  Bachman's warbler became very rare after 1920.

  

     Originally, these warblers ranged from the lower Mississippi River and  east Texas, north to southern Indiana, and along the east coast from Georgia north to southern Maryland (Hamel 1995).  The species' original habitat was southern bottomland, hardwood forest with extensive cane (Arundinaria gigantea) thickets (Hamel 1995).  Clearance of these forests in the 19th century and first decades of the 20th century, both in the United States and in Cuba, where it wintered, eliminated the majority of its habitat.  It is not known to what extent it used canebrakes and bamboo thickets growing on bottomlands, but these were the last habitats in which it was seen. 

 

      A 19th century observer of Bachman's Warblers, O. Widmann, entered bottomland forests in the Mississippi Alluvial Valley, and wrote in 1897, "I had no trouble in finding several singing males on the day of my arrival…  In the wildness of his home it takes several minutes to follow him over fallen trees and around impenetrable thickets or pools of water" (Hamel 1995).  Widmann saw its nest "tied very slightly to a vertical blackberry vine of fresh growth… From above, it was entirely hidden by branchlets of latest growth… to reach the place it was necessary to go through pools of water and heaps of fallen trees and brush.  Such sheltered places are probably chosen to avoid the danger of being trampled down by hogs and cattle roving in these woods" (Hamel 1995).  This wild region was a mixed habitat of sweetgum, blackgum, tulip trees, mulberry, ashes, cottonwood, hackberry and hardwoods; Bachman's warblers were seen mainly in the higher portions, which were also those first cleared (Hamel 1995).

 

     Approximately 400 scientific specimens were collected for museums, and this may have reduced its population at a time when it was already rare (Hamel 1995).  The last nest was found in 1937, and much of this species' life history remains a mystery.  Intensive searches have been carried out by biologists for this bird; a total of 7,000 hours were spent between 1975 and 1979 combing likely habitat areas in South Carolina, Missouri and Arkansas.  In 8,000 hectares (19,768 acres) of apparently suitable habitat, no Bachman's warblers were seen or heard (Hamel 1995).  As recently as 1980, an unconfirmed sighting was reported in Cuba, but the last confirmed sighting of a Bachman's warbler was in 1961 near Charleston, South Carolina (Hamel 1995).  An unconfirmed sighting was made in 1988, but none have been seen since.