212 BULLETIN 203, UNITED STATES NATIONAL MUSEUM 



Egg dates. — Maine : 95 records, June 4 to 30 ; 74 records, June 7 to 15, 

 indicating the height of the season. 



New Brunswick : 59 records, June 7 to 28 ; 37 records, June 13 to 19. 



New York : 23 records, June 3 to July 1 ; 13 records, June 5 to 12. 



Pennsylvania : 41 records, May 28 to June 13 ; 32 records. May 30 to 

 June 8 (Harris) . 



DENDKOICA TIGRINA (Gmelin) 



CAPE MAY WARBLER 



Pi^te29 



Habits 



This is the bird that made Cape May famous. Dr. Stone (1937) 

 suggests that it has "served to advertise the name of Cape May 

 probably more widely than has been done in any other way." The 

 inappropriate name Cape May warbler was given to it by Alexander 

 Wilson (1831), who described and figured it from a specimen of an 

 adult male taken by his friend, George Ord, in a maple swamp in Cape 

 May County, N. J., in May, 1811. He never saw it in life and never 

 obtained another specimen. Audubon never saw it in life, the speci- 

 mens figured by him having been obtained by Edward Harris near 

 Philadelphia. Nuttall apparently never saw it. 



Dr. Stone (1937) writes: "Curiously enough it seems never to have 

 been recorded again at Cape May until September 4, 1920, when I 

 recognized one in a shade tree on Perry Street in company with some 

 Chestnut-sided Warblers. Since then we have seen a few nearly every 

 year in spring and fall both at Cape May and at the Point." It is per- 

 haps not to be wondered at that the early ornithologists knew so little 

 about it before 1860, for bird observers were few and widely scattered 

 in those days, and the Cape May warbler is only a hurried migrant 

 through the United States over a very wide immigration range, no- 

 where very abundant, and its numbers seem to fluctuate from year to 

 year. 



Some years before Wilson named the Cape May warbler, a specimen 

 of the same bird flew aboard a vessel off the coast of Jamaica and was 

 painted and described by George Edwards. This was the basis of 

 Gmelin's name tigrina^ little tiger. Although not striped exactly like 

 a tiger, it has carried this name ever since. 



Spring. — Cape May warblers leave their winter home in the West 

 Indies in March and pass through the Bahamas and Florida in March 

 and April, northward along the Atlantic coast, and branch out west- 

 ward to southern Missouri and up through the Mississippi Valley to 

 Minnesota and Canada. Very few stop to settle much short of the 

 Canadian border. Dr. Chapman (1907) writes of the spring migra- 



