66 BRE^YSTER'S ^YARBLER. 



the chin. All the rest of this brood, like the one shot on the 14th, were leuco- 

 bronchiales. 



At this date (July 17) the young birds, though still receiving food from their 

 parents, feed themselves freely, both in the trees and in the underbrush, where 

 we sometimes observed them basking with outstretched wing in a spot of sun- 

 light. They are now more silent than before and their peculiar infantile chirp 

 has become distinctly transformed into a note resembling the chirp of the adult 

 bird. 



It now remains briefly to consider the third family of Helminthophilae. 

 The parents in this case were both normal Golden-wings and all of their 

 young, so far as we could discover, were also Golden-wings. Observations 

 taken on the seventeenth of July disclosed the young in their autumnal dress. 

 One at least was a female, with the throat and sides of the head of a very light 

 gray color, but clearly marked off by the much whiter hue of the breast, sub- 

 malar and supra-ocular stripes. The majority of the young were males, now 

 similar to the adult male in plumage, but more olivaceous on the back; the 

 black throat and cheeks slightly veiled by a yellowish wash; the sub-malar 

 stripes, too, met each other broadly under the bill, while in the adult male, as 

 was the case in the other two families, the chin was black throughout. At such 

 close range were some of these birds observed (July 18) that I could see through 

 opera-glasses the sprouting feathers of the wing-coverts as plainly as if the bird 

 were in my hand. 



About the twentieth of July the bonds which held these little families to- 

 gether were broken. The change was startlingly abrupt. In passing through 

 the swamp we were no longer greeted by the chirrupings of the little birds. 

 From time to time we might detect a chrysoptera or a leucobronchialis or two, 

 perhaps in company with some other kind of warbler, feeding silently, well up 

 in the tree-tops, but in most cases it was impossible to decide whether it was an 

 old or a young bird. On two occasions, on the 18th and 20th of July, I heard a 

 chrysoptera sing three or four times in succession the longer second song of this 

 species; this was the only singing of these birds noted since the chrysoptera 

 stopped singing on the sixth of June and the leucobronchialis on the twenty-fourth. 

 The Brewster's Warblers were seen for the last time on August 7; one or two 

 Golden-wings were seen on August 8, and a single male on August 21. 



In order to form a judgment concerning the probability of some of the con- 

 clusions arrived at in the foregoing pages the reader should be aware of the 

 amount of time spent in making the observations. From the time the young 



