58 BULLETIN 203, UNITED STATES NATIONAL MUSEUM 



VERMIVORA PINUS (Linnaeus) 



BLUE-WINGED WARBLER 



Plates 12, 13 



HABITS 



Bagg and Eliot (1937) write: "According to Wilson, this species 

 was discovered by William Bartram, who gave it the descriptive name 

 Parus aureus alls caeruleis (Blue- winged Golden Tit), and sent a 

 specimen to 'Mr. Edwards' by whom it was drawn and etched. Ed- 

 wards suspected its identity with the Pine Creeper of Catesby : hence 

 its present inappropriate name, pinvsy As there are other warblers 

 whose wings are more distinctly blue, those of this warbler being only 

 bluish gray, the old familiar name, blue-winged yellow warbler, which 

 stood for many years, seems more appropriate and more truly descrip- 

 tive. 



The blue-winged warbler is a bird of the so-called Carolinian Life 

 Zone, with a rather restricted breeding range in the Central States and 

 not quite reaching our northern borders. Its center of abundance in 

 the breeding season seems to be in southern Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, 

 northern Kentucky, northern Missouri, and southern Iowa. Its 

 range extends northeastward to New Jersey, southeastern New York, 

 and southern Connecticut. It is fairly common in the latter State, and 

 I know of one small colony in eastern Rhode Island within a mile or 

 two of the Massachusetts line. North of these points in New England 

 it occurs only as a straggler or casual breeder. In southern New Eng- 

 land I have found it in rather open situations, in neglected pastures 

 where there is low shrubbery, brier patches, and bushy thickets around 

 the edges ; or in similar growth along the borders of woods, usually on 

 dry uplands; and sometimes in the rank gi-owth of tall grasses and 

 weeds near the borders of swamps or streams. 



Frank L. Burns wrote to Dr. Chapman (1907) of its haunts in 

 Pennsylvania : "This species is here an inhabitant of the rather open 

 swampy thickets, upland clearings, neglected pastures and fence rows, 

 where the grass and weeds have not been choked out by a too thick 

 growth of briers, bushes, saplings and vines." Dr. Lawrence H. Wil- 

 kmshaw tells me that, in southern Michigan, "this species loves deep 

 swampy woods, where the golden-winged warbler and cerulean war- 

 bler are found." This is quite different from the haunts in which we 

 find it in the east, though Dr. Chapman (1907) says: "It is not, as a 

 rule, a deep woods warbler, though I have found it nesting in heavy 

 forest, but prefers rather, bordering second growths, with weedy open- 



