130 THE TENNESSEE WARBLER. 
LIKE the Nashville Warbler, this bird of the far north owes its name 
to an accident of discovery. Wilson first found it on the banks of the Cum- 
berland in Tennessee, and promptly named it after their common hostess. 
Both Wilson and Audubon regarded the bird as extremely rare, the former 
having seen but two specimens and the latter three. It is known now as one 
of our common migrants in the middle West, but its first positive recognition 
in the case of any individual observer is usually effected by the aid of a gun. 
Altho bright olive-green might be reckoned on first thought a conspicuous 
color, it is precisely the opposite when viewed among the tender greens of 
May, or amidst the changing foliage of autumn. 
The ‘Tennessee Warbler is a rather late and leisurely migrant. It does 
not appear in spring until the leaves are at least half way out, usually about 
the end of the first week in May; and at that season it keeps to the densest 
cover in woodland or orchard trees. But once learn its song and the rest 
is easy. Its voice can readily be distinguished in a May-day chorus, but 
it is not averse to musical effort on dull days, and then is your best chance. 
A dull canopy of cloud, it may be, covers the sky. It is not raining, but the 
face of nature is bathed in an atmosphere heavy with warm moisture, and 
the apple trees gratefully suck up the nourishment and throw out their foliage 
and blossoms visibly before your eyes. Suddenly from the midst of some bower 
of blossom not so far removed but glowing softly down the orchard isle of 
tenuous vapor, there bursts a fine note of inquiry, the prelude of a series 
which rises rapidly to a peremptory challenge, Pichick’, pichick’, pichick’, chick, 
chick, chip, chip, chip. ‘The song is delivered in a rapid crescendo up to the 
last note, but with this the bird suddenly checks himself. If you advance, 
the bird quits his bower for some other flower-hold as difficult, and the 
chances are against your catching anything but a dull yellowish glimpse. 
You cannot see him, but you have heard and that is enough. 
In the fall, strange to say, the birds not only seem much more plentiful, 
but they quit the woods and resort almost exclusively to wayside thickets, 
second-growth clearings, and the like. At this season too they are much 
more approachable. Either they are less suspicious now that the love- 
sickness is over, or else they trust more implicitly to the protection of the 
sere leaf. 
