440 BULLETIN 2 3, UNITED STATES NATIONAL MUSEUM 



and more northern countries, to breed. From the scarcity of the 

 species, its passage has hitherto been unobserved; and it is now, for 

 the first time, introduced as a bird of the United States. Authors 

 who have heretofore made mention of it, represent it as a permanent 

 resident of St. Domingo, and other islands of the West Indies, and 

 even describe its nest and habits, as observed there." 



Bonaparte evidently did not notice the difference between the west- 

 ern and the yellow palm warblers, perhaps assuming that the latter 

 was the spring plumage and the former the winter bird. It remained 

 for Ridgway (1876) to point out the differences and separate the two 

 subspecies. This is not strange, for the western bird is known to us 

 mainly as a migrant and winter resident, its summer home being in 

 central Canada, with a southward extension into northern Minne- 

 sota and Wisconsin. The 1931 A. O. U. Check-List does not include 

 Wisconsin in its breeding range, but Francis Zirrer writes to me that 

 it "is not overly rare during the summer" near Hayward, AVis. "Here 

 the bird is a dweller in the cedar-tamarack-spruce bogs, and from its 

 arrival in spring (early May) until its departure in fall (early Oc- 

 tober) it is rarely seen anywhere else. Probably because of this, be- 

 cause of the scarcity of interested observers, and because of the fact 

 that high water in spring and early summer makes our bogs not easily 

 accessible, the bird has more or less escaped the attention of Wisconsin 

 ornithologists. After its arrival I see it feeding mostly in cedars 

 and black spruces ; later, when the tamaracks sprout new green, most 

 of its searching for food is done there. Toward the end of August, 

 when the breeding season is over and until its departure, it visits other 

 trees, especially poplars, but even then only those close to the bog." 



A. L. Eand (1944) records it as "a common summer resident, breed- 

 ing, in northeastern British Columbia, 150 to 160 miles northwest of 

 Fort Nelson along the Alaska Highway." He also mentions a speci- 

 men in the National Museum at Ottawa, "taken at Bernard Harbor, 

 Dolphin and Union Straits, Sept. 28, 1915 by Fritz Johansen." 



Spring. — The migration routes of the two races of the palm warb- 

 ler are interesting. The yellow palm spends the winter in the Gulf 

 States and crosses the more southern Alleghenies to migrate north- 

 ward along the Atlantic coast to northern New England and southern 

 Canada, while the western palm, leaving its winter home in Florida 

 and the West Indies, crosses the Alleghenies in the opposite direction 

 seldom as far north as the Carolinas, and migrates northward through 

 the broad Mississippi Valley to Canada. Casual wanderers have, of 

 course, occurred outside of these limits, but the main routes are as 

 outlined. In Illinois, according to Ridgway (1889), "during the 

 spring migration this is one of the most abundant of the Warblers, 

 and for a brief season may be seen along the fences, or the borders of 



