 They are plain-olive to olive-gray, with white underbellies, bright yellow chests and throats, and a distinctive facial pattern consisting of a rufous cap, a white eyebrow-line (or superciliary), a dark eye-line fading into a rufous cheek, and a white malar marking.The bill is rather stout for a warbler, the wings are round and stubby, and the tail is long, often raised at a high angle and flicked.While rufous-capped warblers are generally birds of tropical shrubby highlands, North American sightings tend to be in oak woodland canyon bottoms, near running water, while the birds stay low in dense vegetation.