sennett's titmouse 409 



PARUS ATRICRISTATUS SENNETTI (Ridgway) 



SENNETT'S TITMOUSE 

 HABITS 



More than 50 years elapsed after the species was discovered before 

 this nortliern race of the black-crested titmouse was named and de- 

 scribed, as distinct subspecifically from the race found in the Rio Grande 

 Valley and in eastern Mexico. Ridgway (1904) describes it as "similar 

 to B. a. atricristatus, but decidedly larger; upper parts much clearer 

 gray, with little, if any, olive tinge; adult female with crest feathers 

 more often and more extensively tipped with gray, and both sexes with 

 forehead more often tinged with brown or rusty, sometimes deeply so." 

 He goes on to say in a footnote that "any pronounced rusty tinge to the 

 color of the forehead indicates, in the writer's opinion, admixture of 

 B. bicolor blood." And he suggests that the two subspecies described by 

 Sennett, from Bee County, Tex., are merely hybrids between the two 

 species, bicolor and atricristatus. 



John Cassin (1852), who first described the species and published the 

 first colored plate of it, says that it was discovered in Texas by John 

 Woodhouse Audubon, and it was described by Cassin in the Proceedings 

 of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia, vol. 5, p. 103, 1850. 

 The only information he had regarding its habits came from Dr. Samuel 

 W. Woodhouse, from whose journal he quoted as follows: 



While our party was encamped on the Rio Salado in Texas, near San Antonio, 

 in March, 1851, I observed this handsome little chickadee for the first time. It 

 was busily engaged in capturing insects among the trees on the bank of the 

 stream, and like the other species of its family, was incessantly in motion and 

 very noisy. At our camp at Quihi, on the eighth of May, I again found it very 

 abundant among the oaks. The young males, which were then fully grown, much 

 resembled the adult females, both wanting the black crest which characterizes 

 the male. Afterwards I noticed this species, occurring sparingly, along our 

 route, as far as the head waters of the San Francisco river in New Mexico. 

 [The birds seen in New Mexico were probably the gray titmouse, P. tnornattis 

 ridgzi'ayi.] 



1 observed it almost entirely in trees bordering streams of water. * * * It oc- 

 curred in small parties, appeared to be very sociable and lively in its habits, 

 and in general appearance and in nearly all its notes which I heard, it so very 

 much resembled the common crested chickadee of the Northern States as scarcely 

 to be recognized as a distinct species at a short distance. 



The distribution now given for this subspecies in the 1931 Check-List 

 is the "Lower Austral Zone of central Texas, from Tom Green and 

 Concho counties east to the Brazos River, and from Young County south 

 to Nueces and Bee counties." 



George Finlay Simmons (1925) lists as its haunts, in the Austin 

 region, "woodlands along creeks ; scrub oaks and cedars on hillsides ; oak 



