CERULEAN WARBLER 329 



Egg dates. — California : 10 records, May 14 to June 25 ; 6 records, 

 June 3 to 14, indicating the height of the season. 

 Washington : 3 records, June 5 to 11 (Harris) . 



DENDROICA CERULEA (Wilson) 



CERULEAN WARBLER 



Plate 39 



HABITS 



This heavenly-blue wood warbler was first introduced to science, 

 figured, and named by Wilson in the first volume of his American 

 Ornithology. Only the male was figured and described from a speci- 

 men received from Charles Willson Peale and taken in eastern Penn- 

 sylvania. The female was not known until Charles Lucien Bona- 

 parte described it in his continuation of Wilson's American Orni- 

 thology. Strangely enough the discovery of this specimen was also 

 made by a member of the famous Peale family, Titian Peale, the bird 

 (having been taken in the same general region, on the banks of the 

 Schuylkill, August 1, 1825. Audubon met with it later, but was al- 

 most wholly wrong in what he wrote about it, though his plate is 

 good. 



The species is now known to occupy a rather extensive breeding 

 range located mainly west of the Alleghenies and east of the Great 

 Plains from southern Ontario and central New York south\vard to 

 the northern parts of some of the Gulf States and Texas. It is, how- 

 ever, decidedly local in its distribution over much of this range. 



This warbler, a bird of the treetops in heavy deciduous woods, 

 where its colors make it difficult to distinguish among the lights and 

 shadows of the lofty foliage and against the blue sky, is well named 

 cerulean ! In his notes from central New York, Samuel F. Eathbun 

 writes : "The type of grow^th to which the cerulean warbler is partial 

 appears to be the rather open forests in the lowlands and often along 

 some stream. During the nesting season, it will not be found to any 

 extent in the better class of hardwood trees of the uplands; in fact, 

 this warbler shows a strong liking for areas where large elms and 

 soft maples and black ash are the dominant trees." Verdi Burtch 

 wrote to Dr. Chapman (1907) that near Branchport, N. Y., this 

 warbler is "locally abundant in mixed growths of oak and maple with 

 a few birch and hickory." In other portions of its range, it is found 

 in mixed woods of maples, beech, basswood or linden, elm, sycamore, 

 or oaks. Frank C. Kirkwood (1901) found that, in Maryland, "the 

 species has a decided preference for high open woods clear of under- 

 brush. * * * The trees are principally chestnuts, with oaks, 

 hickorys, tulip trees, etc." 



