ORCHARD ORIOLE 207 



songless, but before the vernal equinox they began to sing sweetly 

 again. In the Motagua Valley in Guatemala, where orchard orioles 

 winter in great numbers, at the beginning of April I heard no bird's 

 voice so much as theirs; for the Gray's thrushes, so abundant in the 

 cleared plantation lands, had not yet come into full song. The orioles 

 that roosted in the dense stand of young canes beside the Rio Morja 

 raised a delightful chorus when they awoke at dawn. Their music 

 increased in both quality and abundance up to the time of their de- 

 parture; and the young, black-throated, yellowish males, eager to use 

 their newly acquired singing voices, performed as much if not more 

 than the mature males in chestnut and black. They captured my 

 heart as no other birds, they whistled so often and so cheerily on the 

 eve of their long migration, when most other birds of passage sing- 

 little or none." 



In El Salvador, according to Dickey and van Rossem (1938), the 

 orchard oriole is a "common winter visitant and abundant fall and 

 spring migrant in the lowlands throughout the country." They refer 

 to some of its habits as follows: 



About the middle of February, in 1926, the ceiba trees on the coastal plain at 

 Rio San Miguel were a solid mass of pink bloom, to which came unbelievable 

 numbers of orchard orioles in search of the swarming insects. Until this sudden 

 concentration we had noticed no sex segregation, but now it was suddenly 

 apparent that these great flocks, composed of hundreds of individuals, were made 

 up almost exclusively of old males. On February 20, a great ceiba standing alone 

 in a grass pasture was watched for over an hour. No accurate estimate could be 

 made of the number of birds present, but it certainly ran into many hundreds. 

 The wide-spreading mat of blossoms was at least one hundred feet from the ground, 

 and the darting restless swarm of old males packed it literally to a point where 

 there was no room for more. * * * Orioles of the smaller species (particularly 

 of the genus Icterus) are not, as a group, noted for their flocking tendencies, but 

 spurius while in winter quarters is very much of an exception to this general rule. 

 Not only does it spend the day in small groups, but it frequently concentrates still 

 further at sundown and roosts in good-sized flocks. Such a night roost, composed 

 of about fifty birds, was seen on many occasions in a tangle of mimosa and vines in 

 a barranca at Divisadero. Others were observed at Barra de Santiago in the low 

 scrub of a sand spit between the ocean and lagoon. 



DISTRIBUTION 



Range. — Manitoba and southern Ontario to northern South 

 America. 



Breeding range. — The orchard oriole breeds from southern Man- 

 itoba (Cypress River), central and southeastern Minnesota (Nisswa, 

 Stillwater), central Wisconsin (northern Wood County), southern 

 Michigan (Greenville, Port Huron), southern Ontario (Lambton, 

 Gananoque), north-central Pennsylvania (Punxatawney, Lock 

 Haven), central and central-eastern New York (casually to Ithaca 



