ORCHARD ORIOLE 205 



in July it is unusual to hear the song at all, and I have noticed that the gathering 

 flocks are composed entirely of plain yellow birds — females and young or perhaps 

 only young birds — and that the males have suddenly disappeared. Sometimes 

 these flocks consist of as many as twenty-five or thirty individuals, but more 

 commonly of ten or twelve. It seems that several families of orioles from a certain 

 breeding area congregate in a selected stretch of woods and fields after the nesting 

 season and spend a month or six weeks there getting acquainted and organized 

 before starting on their southward migration, but this is a conjecture that would 

 be difficult to substantiate. 



Winter. — Alexander F. Skutch contributes this account: The orch- 

 ard oriole is one of the very first of the visitors from the north to reach 

 Central America as fall approaches. On July 20, 1932, I found a male 

 and female together in a bushy pasture beside the Motagua River in 

 Guatemala — only 3 months earlier, on April 21, I had seen the last 

 of the spring migrants lower in the same Valley. Cherrie recorded the 

 species at San Jose, Costa Rica, on July 31 ; while still farther south it 

 has been met at El Pozo de Terraba, Costa Rica, on August 10, and 

 in the Canal Zone on the same date. Many adults arrive in northern 

 Central America in worn breeding plumage, having left their nesting 

 area before completing the postnuptial molt. Considering these facts, 

 Osbert Salvin long ago surmised that the orchard oriole might breed in 

 the Guatemalan highlands; but subsequent intensive exploration has 

 failed to reveal its presence there during the summer months. 



"Like the Baltimore oriole, the orchard oriole is widely distributed 

 over Central America during the period of the northern winter. It is 

 found in midwinter from Guatemala to Panama^ and along both the 

 Caribbean and Pacific coasts. I have met it at this season in regions 

 of such contrasting climate and vegetation as the wet Caribbean low- 

 lands of Guatemala and Honduras and the arid coast of El Salvador, 

 where in early February these birds were abundant amid cacti and low, 

 thorny trees at Cutuco. But although as widely, the orchard oriole is 

 by no means so uniformly distributed over Central America as the 

 Baltimore oriole. It seems to winter in far greater numbers in Guate- 

 mala and Honduras than in Costa Rica and Panamtl. In the former 

 countries it equals or exceeds the Baltimore oriole in abundance, at 

 least at lower altitudes, while in Costa Rica the Baltimore oriole is 

 certainly the more common bird — on this last point my own experience 

 is quite in accord with that of Carriker (1910), whose ornithological 

 work in the country antedated my own by a thud of a century. In 

 altitudinal range, the orchard oriole is far more restricted than the 

 Baltimore oriole. Even in northern Central America, where it is so 

 abundant in the lowlands, it is rarely met above 4,000 or 5,000 feet. 

 In the Terraba Valley of Costa Rica, from 1,500 feet upward, the 

 orchard oriole is a very rare winter visitant, while the Baltimore oriole 

 is fairly abundant. 



