The Great Destruccion of Warblers 377 



1907, there were spring days when the orchard trees fairly swarmed with 

 Warblers. It certainly cannot be an exaggeration to say that, with ten Warb- 

 lers to a tree and ten trees in an orchard, a hundred of them would be present 

 in one yard. All of the twenty or more days of the migration period would 

 not be 'Warbler days,' but a thousand records for a season seems to be a fair 

 average, if each Warbler present each day is counted. Evidently this would 

 mean that the same bird sometimes would be counted for several days. For- 

 tunately for the presentation of this subject, my notebooks show pretty clearly 

 what I have seen and recorded in the seasons that have followed the 'Great 

 Death' as we are wont to call it. From 1908 to 1913, the number of Warblers 

 seen each year varied from forty to seventy-five, counting frequently, as before 

 said, the same individual on several successive days. The best of the succeed- 

 ing years was 19 13. I spent from two to four hours daily in the counting of the 

 birds, and a dozen village yards were visited. The number of Warblers recorded 

 in the migration period of twenty days was 264. This was after six seasons for 

 replenishment of numbers, and should be set over against the 2,000 or more 

 that would have been found in the dozen yards previous to 1907. The present 

 year was a poor one for seeing migrants, and the number of Warblers recorded 

 was 52. Or to put the figures in another form, we would have this statement: 

 After the great catastrophe, the number of returning Warblers was but 2 per 

 cent of their former number, and after a period of six years they had increased 

 to 10 per cent. 



This testimony, along with these figures, probably will fail to convince the 

 skeptical concerning the enormous loss of bird life in the Upper Mississippi 

 Valley in May, 1907; therefore there is need of a cloud of witnesses, and the 

 urgency is great that others testify regarding the destruction that then befell 

 the Warblers. 



