igoij Saunders — Cerulean Warbler. 183 



THE NESTING OF THE CERULEAN WARBLER. 



By W. E. Saunders, London, Ont. 



Among: the rarer small birds of the Great Lakes region, none 

 have attracted me more than the Cerulean Warbler. Perhaps 

 this has been on account of the difficulties encountered in watching 

 it, and the almost prohibitive heights at which it conducts its 

 matrirnonial affairs, or perhaps on account of its dainty colours, 

 pure white beneath and blue above; but from whatever cause, the 

 attraction has certainly existed. Except in the period of nest 

 building, it seldom comes to the ground, and as a rule the song 

 comes from such a height that it takes some minutes to locate the 

 singer. In Ontario, this Warbler is fairly well distributed, and is 

 common from the west end, by the Detroit River, at least as far 

 east as St. Thomas, but as the distance north from Lake Erie 

 grows greater, it becomes less common and more local. Near 

 London it is rare and very local ; five males, in widely scattered 

 woods being noted within seven miles of the city this year, while 

 at Bryanston, fifteen miles northeast, there are some woods in 

 which it is fairly common. Its summer distribution on the whole 

 continent is from the Alleghanies west to the plains, and from 

 Tennessee, Kansas, and Missouri north to Central New York, 

 Southern Ontario, Michigan and Minnesota. Throughout this 

 range there are many points ot abundance, but its habit of living 

 so high up in the trees makes the finding of its nest so difficult 

 that its eggs are rare in collections, and its intimate acquaint- 

 ances are few among men ; and indeed until I was equipped with 

 a good field glass I accomplished little in the solving of their 

 nesting problem, but this year, encouraged by the experience of 

 Robert Elliott, who found one inaccessible nest in May, 1899, 

 near Bryanston, Ont, I determined to really do some work on 

 this interesting bird. 



As its nearest centre of abundance is near the west end of 

 the Ontario peninsula, where I had already met with it in great 

 numbers in a previous year, a preliminary trip was made some 

 miles below Chatham, which resulted in finding two woods where 



