In the Manual of the Ornithology of the United States and Canada, Thomas Nuttall (1786-1859) changed the name of the bird that Alexander Wilson (1766-1813) called a Yellow-rump warbler to a “Yellow-crowned warbler, or Myrtle bird.” Nuttall justified the name change by writing that the bird “leaves us for the south, and spends the winter season among the myrtle swamps of Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia. The berries of the Myrica cerifera, both the large and dwarf kind, are his particular favourites.” When John James Audubon organized an expedition of the upper Atlantic coast of North America in the summer of 1833, he noted that the Yellow-crowned warbler, or Myrtle bird, as among the first to greet him and his party upon reaching Labrador. When in East Florida and Charleston, South Carolina, during the early spring months, Audubon went on to note that the species was “very abundant.”
In the first edition of Birds of America, Audubon used the common name of Yellow-rump Warbler for the Yellow-crowned warbler, or Myrtle bird. For the later octavo edition of Birds of America, Audubon changed the common name of the Yellow-rump Warbler to the Yellow-crowned wood-warbler. The current common name for the bird is the Yellow-rumped warbler, unless the science community decides to split the Yellow-rumped warbler between the Myrtle warbler and Audubon’s warbler (Plate 395).