BLACKBURN IAN WARBLER 



179 



American Redstart's, and another that began so much Hke a Nash- 

 ville that I had to hear him several times, near by, to be convinced 

 that there was not a Nashville chiming in. Sometimes, again, tone 

 and delivery are varied toward excessive languidness ; and some 

 times, contrariwise, toward sharp, wiry 'thinness'. The Blackburn- 

 ian's call-notes are small and scantily peculiar; — at least, I have 

 never learned to recognize them surely, among kindred 'chippings'." 

 (Thayer, MS.) 



Miss Paddock describes the song as "very shrill and fine, grow- 

 ing even more shrill and wiry as it rises toward the end," and 

 renders it as follows: 



'■ r r v V 



J. W, Preston writes that in northern Minnesota during May and 

 early June the males, perched upon "a dry and broken branch of some 

 tall, old hemlock" will sit and sing for hours. He describes the song 

 as somewhat resembling the Black-throated Green's, but as "richer and 

 more lively." 



Nesting Site. — A nest found by A. J. Dayan at Lyon's Falls, N. Y,, 

 was saddled on a horizontal limb eighty-four feet from the ground and 

 about ten feet from the trunk. (Merriani^.) Bowles' describes a nest 

 found in New Hampshire, as placed in a sugar maple, sixty feet from 

 the ground, on a limb seven feet from the body of the tree. Two nests 

 found by Preston^ in Minnesota, were respectively in a hemlock twenty 

 feet up and against the tree, and in a black spruce thirty feet up far 

 out on the tip of a branch. 



Two nests, found at Branchport, N. Y., (Burtch, MS.) were 

 placed in hemlocks, one of them being thirty-five feet from the ground 

 and six feet from the tree-trunk. 



Nest. — Dayan's nest is described by Merriam as "large, substan- 

 tial, and very compact. It consists almost entirely of a thick and 

 densely woven mat of the soft down of the cat-tail (Typha lati folia), 

 with seeds attached, and is lined with fine lichens, horse-hair, and a 

 piece of white thread. On the outside is an irregular covering of small 

 twigs and rootlets, with here and there a stem of moss or a bit of lichen." 

 Bowles' describes the nest as "composed of hemlock twigs, rootlets, a 

 few pine needles and bits of Usnea all woven rather loosely together 

 and thinly lined with horse-hair." Preston's" nests had a light plat- 

 form of dead spruce twigs with Usnea interwoven, and lined with finely 



