Vol. XXI 



1904 



I KoPMAN, Bird Migration in the Lower Miss. Valley. AQ 



lowed. August 1 2 I took a specimen of the Golden-winged Warbler. 

 At Bay St. Louis, Miss., Andrew Allison has taken Blackburn's 

 Warbler, Aug. 11. While it is not always the same species that 

 shows this unexpected tendency, it happens in one case or another 

 with too much frequency to be disposed of on the ground of fortuity. 

 It is obvious also that birds of about the same class have been 

 participant in the tendency. These early movements have been 

 known to include the rarer vireos also. In 1893, the Philadelphia 

 Vireo, which had appeared furtively during the last days of 

 July in a heavy growth of willows on the batture land of the Mis- 

 sissippi at Convent, La., forty miles up the river (west) from New 

 Orleans, appeared in astonishing abundance August 2. I took one 

 specimen, but there was no need of killing more, as the birds were 

 about me on all sides. In spring, during the time of abundance of 

 the Warbling Vireo, which is a common breeder along the Missis- 

 sippi in southern Louisiana, I have never seen the Philadelphia 

 Vireo, but beside the record just noted, I have several other rec- 

 ords of its occurrence in this section in fall, always later, however, 

 than on the above occasion. As for the Blue-headed Vireo, H. L. 

 Ballowe (now Dr. Ballowe), of Diamond, La., on the Mississippi 

 thirty miles south of New Orleans, sent me in 1893 a specimen of 

 this bird that he killed August 4. Taken all in all, this is prob- 

 ably the most remarkable of these early records. The Blue-headed 

 Vireo is a winter resident in the wet woods of southern Louisiana, 

 but it commonly appears only at the beginning of the winter. The 

 August record seems more in the nature of a ' freak ' record than 

 do any of the other records. A rare bird in this part of the South, 

 whose case, nevertheless, is very clearly indicated as that of a bird 

 preferring early fall migration, is the Olive-sided Flycatcher. In 

 1894 Mr. Ballowe sent me a specimen he had killed at Diamond, 

 August 31. Andrew Allison recorded the Olive-sided Flycatcher 

 at Bay St. Louis, August 29, 1902, and the present season I saw 

 one August 16, at Covington, La., like Bay St. Louis, in pine woods. 

 Covington is less than forty miles north of New Orleans. 



One of the strange features of the early fall migration of this 

 latitude is that it is composed chiefly of those species that in spring 

 give little of their presence here, especially in the fertile alluvial 

 of the Mississippi delta. Such are the Yellow Warbler, the Red- 



