BREWSTERS WARBLER. 



Three years ago, in the Auk for October, 1907, I published an account of 

 a male Brewster's Warbler found during the month of June on the edge of a 

 swamp in the town of Lexington, Mass. Ahhough the bird remained in the 

 same locality throughout the breeding season, neither his mate nor nest was 

 discovered and little hope was entertained that this interesting addition to the 

 Lexingtonian fauna would become firmly established. That such is the case, 

 however, the observations recorded in these pages will tend to show. While I 

 was walking through this same swamp with Dr. W. M. Tyler on the fifth of 

 June of this year (1910), my companion detected a Brewster's Warbler, appar- 

 ently a female, in some shrubbery in one corner of the swamp, within one hun- 

 dred and seventy yards of the station occupied by the bird which I discovered 

 in 1907. Close at hand, on the other side of a fence that divides the swamp 

 from a jungle of Gray Birches and Raspberry vines, a male Brewster's Warbler 

 and a male Golden-winged Warbler were chasing each other about amid the 

 low trees and shrubs. Both were singing, one in quick response to the other. 

 The song of each was the familiar song of the Golden-wing, although a difference 

 between the voices of the two birds was discernible, the quality of the tone being 

 sharper and clearer in the Brewster's than in the Golden-wing. The difference 

 however was no greater nor of any other sort than what one perceives in com- 

 paring the songs of different individuals of the Golden-wing. In the mutual 

 chase of the two males, the Golden-wing seemed to be the more aggressive. 



On returning to the spot where we had left the female, we flushed her from 

 her nest which rested firmly on the ground at the foot of some stalks of Meadow 

 Rue and Rugose Goldenrod, and contained five eggs — white speckled with black 

 or dark brown around the larger pole, and indistinguishable from the eggs of the 

 Golden-wing. The nest, too, was fashioned like the Golden-wing's, being built 

 of dry leaves and Grapevine bark, lined with fibrous shreds of plants and with 



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