BREWSTER'S WARBLER. 65 



To return to the second family which we left on the twenty-ninth of June. 

 This brood also, it will be remembered, was of mixed parentage, the father being 

 a chrysoptera, the mother a leticobronchialis. On the eighth of July the young 

 were well along in their progress to the first-autumn plumage. The one with the 

 dusky throat and ear-coverts now shows the characteristic marks of H. chrysop- 

 tera, the dark ash, or slate-colored throat and upper breast being sharply defined 

 against the ashy-white lower breast and sub-malar stripes which meet together 

 on the chin. The dark areas on the sides of the head are likewise well defined; 

 The crown is still olive-colored, the back gray, with a touch of olive. The other 

 members of this brood of young birds have the under parts gray throughout, 

 tinted with a varying amount of yellow in different individuals. This variability 

 may be connected with sex, the female leucobronchialis being more distinctly 

 charged with yellow than the male. No member of this brood, with the excep- 

 tion of the one above noted, showed any trace of the chrysoptera throat and cheek 

 markings. 



On the fourteenth of July I shot one of the young Brewster's Warblers 

 belonging to this brood. The length of this specimen ^ in the flesh, from the tip 

 of the bill to the end of the tail, was 4.8 inches, wing 2.5 inches, tail 1.9 inches. 

 Forehead and crown yellow, veiled posteriorly by the olive-green tips of the 

 feathers; narrow supra-ocular line whitish; the rest of the upper parts gray 

 tinged with olive; lores and a post-ocular spot black; rectrices slate-colored, 

 the inner webs of the external pair extensively, of the second and third pairs 

 entirely, white;" primaries slate-colored, edged with gray; secondaries slate- 

 colored, edged with olive; median and greater wing-coverts tipped with yellow; 

 these coverts have not yet completed their growth after the post-juvenal moult, 

 many of them still being in the shape of sprouting pin feathers; under parts 

 white, lightly washed with yellow, especially on the breast, and with a faint 

 tinge of ash on the flanks. Dr. H. W. Rand, who kindly sexed this specimen for 

 me, reports it to be a male. 



By the seventeenth of July the young of this brood appeared to have as- 

 sumed their full winter dress. The young chrysoptera differed from his father 

 merely in having the yellow of the crown and gray of the back washed over 

 with olive, and the sub-malar white stripes of the right and left sides united on 



' Fig. 1 on the accompanying plate. Coll. Mus. Comp. Zool., No. 48385. 



- Mr. C. J. MajTiard (Warblers of New England, 1904, p. S.5-85) sets great store by the caudal color- 

 patterns in Helminthophila pinus, H. chrysoptera, and the closely related forms H. leucobronchialis and 

 H. lawrencei. I do not believe that the tail markings in these birds signify anything beyond a large 

 range of individual variation. 



