THE GOLDEN- WINGED WARBLER. 



{Helminthophila chrysoptera. ) 



THIS member of the large family 

 of warblers is considered rare, 

 or only common in certain lo- 

 calities of its range, which is 

 eastern United States in summer and 

 Central America in winter. Its com- 

 mon names are blue golden-winged 

 warbler, and golden-winged swamp 

 warbler. It makes its appearance in 

 May, when it may occasionally be seen 

 about orchards. It soon retires into 

 dense underbrush, however, and few 

 persons who are not woodsmen ever 

 get more than a glimpse of it. It 

 breeds all through its range, but only 

 casually north of Massachusetts. It 

 builds its nest on or near the ground, 

 in a plant tuft. It is made of grass, 



and is deep and bulky. The eggs 

 are four or five, white, with reddish 

 dots. 



Ridgway says that June, 1885, he 

 found these birds breeding along the 

 southern edge of Calhoun Prairie. Rich- 

 land county, Illinois, and Mr. H. K. 

 Coale states that on May 11, 1884, in a 

 wood on the Kankakee river, in Starke 

 county, Indiana, he found the golden- 

 winged warbler quite common. Eight 

 were seen — -all males, which were sing- 

 ing. Somewereflushed from the ground 

 and flew up to the nearest small tree, 

 where they sat motionless next the 

 trunk. The locality was a moist situa- 

 tion, overgrown with young trees and 

 bushes. 



PET ANIMALS AS CAUSES OF DISEASE. 



PAPERS presented last summer at 

 the French Congress for Tuber- 

 culosis at Paris demonstrate, 

 says The Medical News, what has 

 hitherto been very doubtful, that aviary 

 and human tuberculosis are essentially 

 the same pathologic process due to the 

 same germ modified by a cultural envi- 

 ronment, but convertible under favorable 

 circumstances one into the other. An 

 Englishman has found that more than 

 ten per cent, of canaries and other song 

 birds that die in captivity succumb to 

 tuberculosis, and parrots have come in 

 for a share of condemnation in this 

 connection. By far the larger number 

 of monkeys who die in captivity are 

 carried off by tuberculosis, and while, 

 fortunately, the keeping of monkeys as 

 house pets is not very general, at the 

 same time there is some danger of con- 

 tagion. Nocard. the greatest living 

 authority on tuberculosis in animals, 

 and the man to whom we owe the best 

 culture methods for the tubercle bacil- 

 lus, found in a series of autopsies on 

 dogs that out of two hundred successive 

 autopsies on unselected dogs that died 

 at the great veterinary school at Alfort, 

 near Paris, in more than one-half the 

 cases there were tubercular lesions, and 



in many of them thelesions were of such 

 a character as to make them facile and 

 plenteous disseminators of infective 

 tuberculous materials. 



Parrots are known to be susceptible 

 to a disease peculiar to themselves, and 

 a number of fatal cases in human be- 

 ings of what was at first supposed to be 

 malignant influenza, pneumonia was 

 traced to the bacillus which is thought 

 to be the cause of the parrot disease. 

 Cats are sometimes known to have 

 tuberculosis, and that they have in 

 many cases been carriers of diphtheria 

 and other ordinary infections is more 

 than suspected. There is not at pres- 

 ent any great need for a crusade on 

 sanitary grounds against the keeping 

 of pet animals, but they are multiply- 

 ing more and more, and it does not 

 seem unreasonable that greater care in 

 the matter of determining the first signs 

 of disease should be demanded of their 

 owners, and then so guarding them as 

 to prevent their being a source of con- 

 tagion to human beings. Attention 

 should be paid to this warning as re- 

 gards children, as animals play more 

 freely with them and the children are 

 more apt to be infected. 



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