192 U. S. NATIONAL MUSEUM BULLETIN 211 



opening foilage or preparing to build their basket nests. But it is by 

 no means confined to such habitats even in the breeding season, for 

 it is equally at home in the shade trees about houses or along village 

 streets or country roadsides. In the prairie regions it lives in the tim- 

 ber belts along the streams or in the tree claims about farms and 

 ranches; and in the south it is especially common about the plantations 

 and in the shade trees about the planter's home. Everywhere it 

 shuns the forests and the heavily wooded regions, preferring the open 

 and cultivated lands, especially near human dwellings. In the north, 

 where orchards are not as common as they were, the orchard oriole 

 seems to find a satisfactory substitute in the nurseries, where trees 

 and shrubs of many kinds are cultivated. And H. C. Oberholser 

 (1938) writes: "One of the interesting and rather surprising ornitholog- 

 ical experiences in southeastern Louisiana, particularly in the region 

 of the Mississippi River Delta and the coastal areas west of that point, 

 is to find the Orchard Oriole so common an inhabitant of the marshes, 

 occurring even in the grasses and reeds as well as in the bushes and 

 trees that fringe the bayous and ditches." 



Spring. — Alexander F. Skutch writes to me: "The orchard oriole 

 disappears from Central America during April. My latest record for 

 Costa Rica is April 6, when a solitary male was seen at El General. 

 In the Motagua Valley of Guatemala, where the species is so abundant 

 during the winter, the last individual for the season, a female, was 

 seen on April 21. Their sojourn here covers 9 of the 12 months." 



Alexander Wetmore (1943), while collecting birds in southern Vera 

 Cruz, Mexico, observed a heavy migratory flight of these birds, of 

 which he says: "During the end of March and early April I saw more 

 orchard orioles near Tres Zapotes than I had observed in all my pre- 

 vious years of observation of this species in its northern home. Some 

 days they fairly swarmed, so that it was necessary to scrutinize care- 

 fully every bird collected to avoid shooting them." 



These were probably birds that would migrate northward through 

 eastern Texas and the western part of the Mississippi Valley. Accord- 

 ing to George F. Simmons (1925), the orchard oriole arrives in the 

 Austin region around the middle of April, where it is also a common 

 summer resident. 



Some individuals, probably many, migrate straight northward 

 across the Gulf of Mexico, from Yucatan to Louisiana and other Gulf 

 States at least as far east as northwestern Florida. George H. Lowery, 

 Jr. (1946), recorded an immature male that came aboard his ship on 

 April 30, 1945, 94 miles south of the Louisiana coast and approxi- 

 mately halfway across the Gulf from the coasts of Texas and Florida; 

 and he mentions two males and a female seen by Joseph C. Howell 

 near the middle of the Gulf, May 3-6, 1945. 



