^°'.9o^^^] General Notes. 4O I 



mental work, as a foster-parent of the Cowbird. The nest in question 

 was found in the southern part of Ross Co., Ohio, was photographed and 

 the entire set collected. — W. F. Henninger, Waverly, Ohio. 



The White-throated Warbler at Ann Arbor, Michigan. — I took a speci 

 men of the rare White-throated or Brewster's Warbler [Helminthophila 

 IcHcobronchtalis) near Ann Arbor, Mich., May 18, 1902. It is an adult 

 male, rather larger than either H. finus or H. ckrysoptera, and much 

 ditterent from either in coloration. We have no other record for this 

 county, and only two ior H. J>inus, but H. chrysoptera nests here quite 

 commonly. — Norman A. Wood, Ann Arbor., Mich. 



The Coloration and Relationships of Brewster's Warbler. — Brew- 

 ster's Warbler (Helminthophila leiicobronchialis) is invariably described 

 as having a white breast more or less strongly washed with yellow ; this 

 tinge being reduced to the minimum, but still always present, in so-called 

 typical examples. 



I hope to prove that in pure plumage this bird has the under parts 

 absolutely white, and that the slightest trace of yellow in the breast- 

 feathers brands a specimen as intermediate between leticobronchialis and 

 pinus. It is well known that these extremes are connected by a perfect 

 chain of intermediates, and that the frequency of occurrence of these inter- 

 mediates is, if we count them all as leiicobronchialis, in inverse ratio to 

 the purity of their coloring. (A fact, by the way, which points strongly 

 to the belief that leticobronchialis is a mere variation of pinus.) 



Whitish-breasted and more or less golden-winged examples oi pinus are, 

 comparatively speaking, not rare, but the leucobronchialis end of the grada- 

 tion is meagerly represented by specimens — so meagerly, in fact, that 

 ornithologists have apparently failed to get a clear idea of what it really is. 

 Now since this gradation is from a bright-yellow-breasted, green-backed, 

 toward a piirc--vhite-breasted, gray-backed bird, the assumption that it 

 certainlj^ stops /«.?/ short of attainment of the latter extreme would be 

 absurd, even if there were no specimens to contradict it. There is, how- 

 ever, at least one such specimen, A Brewster's Warbler which I shot at 

 Beltsville, Maryland, in May several years ago, and which is now in the 

 Smithsonian collection, has all the white of the under surface exactly as 

 pure and ashy, and the gray of the back as clear and as sharply defined 

 against the yellow crown, as the best examples of H. chrysuptera. Of 

 course a discrimination between pure white and very slightly tinged 

 white can only be made by experts, and it was as experts that my father 

 and I, both of us artists, examined this specimen with a view to testing 

 this very point. When the bird was fresh, there was no slightest trace of 

 yellow in its breast, on or below the surface of the feathers ; but this 

 purity of coloring has been marred by a most unfortunate accident. 

 The breast was torn in skinning, and grease has exuded on to the feathers, 



