BLACK AND WHITE WARBLER. 
striped irregularly with white; under parts white. Fe. 
male similarly marked but with less black beneath, and 
a rusty black or brownish tone on the sides. Nest on 
the ground at the base of a stump or at the root end of 
some overthrown tree; it is woven of strips of bark, 
plant fibres, and grasses, and is lined with rootlets, 
hairs, etc. Egg white with specks of varying brown at 
the larger end. This Warbler is distributed throughout 
eastern North America; it winters from the Gulf States 
to Central America. 
_ The song of the Black and White Warbler, if one can 
call any of the fsippings of the Warblers by the dignified 
term song, is a series of two distinctly separate high 
tones approximately at highest C and the second whole 
tone higher, off the piano keyboard. These two tones 
are wagged back and forth a number of times, and that 
constitutes the song: 
there is nothing more to it, and yet an acute observer 
will notice that there is something peculiar about the 
accent: it is shifted; the wag is upward in the first half 
of the song and downward in the last half, The bird 
is somehow or other overcome with an exuberance of 
high spirits, and lisps hysterically! There is not a person, 
who, when he heartily laughs, does not do something 
very similar. We say, ‘‘ Mr. was convulsed with 
laughter,” but we took no note of the nature of the 
convulsion ; if we did, we would remember that there 
was a continuous shifting of accent as well as tone in 
the laugh. Some Black and White Warblers are, of 
course, young, and these have not yet advanced so far 
as a shift in the accent of the song—in fact, they do not, 
to use a popular term, know it all. The musical nota- 
tion shows the character of the song perfectly, but I 
must emphasize the fact that the tones are altogether 
too high to be accurately located on the staff: 
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