368 BULLETIN 2 03, UNITED STATES NATIONAL MUSEUM 



writers on American birds. Edward H. Forbush (1929) tells the 

 story very well as follows : 



Audubon met with it but once ; Wilson saw little of it ; Nuttall, who considered 

 it rare, evidently knew little about it, and saw very few. Since his time, how- 

 ever, its numbers have increased until it has become one of the commonest of 

 eastern warblers. Its increase was favored by the destruction of the primeval 

 forest and the continued cutting away of subsequent growths, and later by the 

 increase of neglected fields and pastures with their growths of bushes and 

 brambles, for it is not a frequenter of deep woods, nor yet of well-kept gardens, 

 orchards or farmyards, but prefers neglected or cut-over lands, with a profusion 

 of thickets and briers. So we may find it usually away from houses, in low 

 roadside and brookside thickets, or in sproutlands rather recently cut over. As 

 the coppice grows up the bird retires to other quarters or to the edges of the 

 woods. 



According to William Brewster (1906), the chestnut-sided warbler 

 began to appear in the Cambridge region in about 1830 or 1831, when 

 Nuttall began to find it, but he writes : "Dr. Samuel Cabot told me a 

 year or two before his death that when he was at Harvard College 

 (1832-1836) the Chestnut-sided Warbler was certainly very rare in 

 eastern Massachusetts, and that for some years later it was not com- 

 mon although it gradually but steadily increased in numbers after 

 1835." A similar increase in numbers has been noted in other places. 

 Dr. Chapman (1907) says : "In my own experience, covering the past 

 twenty-five years, at Englewood, N. J., I have seen this Warbler be- 

 come established as an increasingly common summer resident." And 

 A. Radclyffe Dugmore (1902) writes, in reference to the same general 

 region : "In the summer of 1897, the first year that I did any system- 

 atic bird work in this locality, these birds were so little in evidence 

 that I did not observe a single specimen." During the next two years 

 a few pairs were discovered in suitable clearings, but "in 1900 the 

 Warblers were comparatively common, every clearing containing sev- 

 eral pairs, and last summer they were still more abundant, four pairs 

 occupying a clearing of only a few acres, while in the large clearing 

 there were more than could be counted with accuracy ; probably not 

 less than seven or eight pairs." 



The breeding range of the chestnut-sided warbler is now known to 

 extend from central Saskatchewan and Newfoundland on the north 

 throughout southern Canada and the northern half of the United 

 States east of the great plains ; but it is much commoner in the States 

 than in Canada, and its breeding range extends farther south in the 

 Alleghenies, to northern Georgia. Writing of the birds of the cen- 

 tral Allegheny Mountains, Prof. Maurice Brooks (1940) calls it "one 

 of the most abundant warblers in mountainous cut-over areas. It is 

 a characteristic bird of the 'chestnut sprout' association, and reaches 

 the edges of the spruce forests. In northern West Virginia it breeds 



