TENNESSEE WARBLER 75 



YERMIYORA PEREGRINA (Wilson) 

 TENNESSEE WARBLER 



PlATB 14 

 HABITS 



Alexander Wilson (1832) discovered this warbler on the banks of 

 the Cumberland Eiver in Tennessee and gave it the common name it 

 has borne ever since, although it seems inappropriate to name a bird 

 for a State so far from its main breeding range in Canada. Only two 

 specimens were ever obtained by him, and he regarded it as a very rare 

 species, possibly a mere wanderer from some other clime, hence the 

 name peregrina. Audubon never saw more than three individuals, 

 migrants in Louisiana and at Key West. And Nuttall, it seems, 

 never saw it at all. Its apparent rarity in those early days was, per- 

 haps, due to the fact that it is inconspicuously colored and might 

 easily be overlooked or mistaken for a small plainly colored vireo or 

 for the more common Nashville warbler; its fluctuation in numbers 

 from year to year in different places may also have suggested its ap- 

 parent rarity. Here in Massachusetts, we have found it very common 

 in certain years and very scarce in others. 



Spring. — Professor Cooke (1904) says: "In spring migration the 

 Tennessee warbler is rarely found east of the Alleghenies, nor is it so 

 common in the Mississippi Valley as during the fall migration." And 

 he makes the rather surprising statement that "the Biological Survey 

 has received no notes from the South Atlantic States on the spring 

 migration of the Tennessee warbler, nor from Alabama, Mississippi, 

 or Louisiana, though two birds were seen in April in Cuba and some 

 were taken on the island of Grand Cayman, and the species has been 

 noted several times in spring at Pensacola, Fla." Yet he gives April 

 26, 1885, as the date of its arrival at Rising Fawn, Ga. And H. H. 

 Kopman (1905) writes: 



In a small lot of warblers sent Andrew Allison, in the spring of 1902, from the 

 lighthouse on Chandeleur Island, off the southeast coast of Louisiana, was a 

 Tennessee Warbler that had struck the lighthouse April 13. While I had some 

 dubious records of the occurrence of the Tennessee Warbler at New Orleans 

 in the early part of April, it was not until 1903 that I saw the species, in spring, 

 and then in some numbers, singing, and loitering to a degree that surprised me, 

 for the first of these transients appeared April 26, and the last was noted May 9. 

 They were restricted almost to one spot, a thicket of willows beside a pond in 

 the suburbs of New Orleans. I observed others the latter part of April, 1905. 



This warbler seems to be a rare spring migrant through Florida ; 

 A. H. Howell (1932) gives seven records, from Key West to Pensa- 



