Vol. XXI 

 1904 



I General Notes. 83 



(preferably an open perch), lifting up their heads and voices in song, 

 sometimes running one song into another with scarce perceptible inter- 

 val between. One can approach very close to the bird — within three feet 

 and less — when they are settled in low situations, and they often rise 

 from almost under foot if you pass through their haunts in the long grass 

 or rank melilot. To escape, they will flit down into the grass and run 

 away. They will perch for singing as high as thirty feet, but the usual 

 situations are bushes and fences. 



About Cincinnati, I am glad to say, this sweet-voiced sparrow is becom- 

 ing more abundant yearly. In the spring of this year (1903) I began 

 hearing them in full song April 18, and by May i met them in almost 

 every direction in the country, singing from rail fences, wayside thickets 

 and telegraph poles or wires. They especially abound in grass fields and 

 old pastures northeast of the city, where their notes seemed the most 

 familiar sounds, on the days I passed that wa>-. 



I am indebted to Mr. W. L. Dawson of Columbus, Ohio, for securing 

 a specimen from near Rose Hill for me — a male in full song at the time 

 he was shot; and also thank Mr. Wm. Hubbell Fisher for making a care- 

 fully finished skin, and Dr. Josua Lindahl for preserving tongue and con- 

 tents of crop. — Laura Gano, Barlham Place, Richmond, Ind. 



Kirtland's Warbler {Detidroica kirtlandi) on the Coast of South Caro- 

 lina. — On October 29, 1903, I shot near Mount Pleasant, S. C, a superb 

 specimen of Kirtland's Warbler from the top of a water oak tree about 40 

 feet from the ground. 



It was about 1 1 a. m., when I heard a chirp which I thought was that of 

 a Prairie Warbler (Dendroica discolor) and as it was a very late date for a 

 Prairie Warbler to be here I went in search of the bird. 



The sound ceased entirely, but I kept looking into the water oak tree 

 and did not move far away. At last I saw a small bird near the top of the 

 tree behind a cluster of leaves, and when it moved it wagged its tail in a 

 most deliberate and studied manner. The tail seemed to be dispropor- 

 tionately long and the body altogether unsymmetrical in contour. I at 

 once realized that it was a Kirtland's Warbler — a bird that I had looked 

 for in vain for twenty years. The bird kept constantly behind a limb or 

 a cluster of leaves or twigs and remained in this position nearly all the 

 time I was watching it. At last it changed its position and with its 

 breast toward me I fired and found that I had secured a superb specimen 

 of this rare Warbler. 



The specimen is a young male, and had not entirely completed the 

 moult, and was very fat. This bird makes the third specimen captured in 

 South Carolina, and, if I have read the record correctly, makes the third 

 specimen taken in the United States during the autumnal migration ; 

 while it is the latest fall record for the presence of the bird in the United 

 States by eighteen days. 



