340 Moxjsley, The Singing Tree. [jjjy 



idea first occurred to me of paying special attention to them, and 

 ceasing to worry about the females, which as I have already 

 remarked one rarely sees, as compared with the other sex. 



With this object in view, I repaired one day to a favorite wood, 

 on the outskirts of which I located a male Myrtle Warbler (Den- 

 droica coronata) singing from the top of an ash tree. This bird I 

 determined to keep in view, and follow about wherever he went, 

 a thing much easier to carry out in theory than in practice as a rule, 

 although this particular bird was more than kind, and gave me 

 very little trouble. After watching and following him about for 

 some time, I found that he generally ended by coming back to 

 the ash tree, from which he always sang. Seeing that this was the 

 case I gave up following him about, and remained in the immediate 

 neighborhood of this tree, where soon afterwards I had the satis- 

 faction of seeing him make a sudden dart from the top of it into a 

 nearby spruce, and there I found the female and her nest, and at 

 the same time learnt the secret which has since enabled me to add 

 many a rare warbler to my breeding list. Do not imagine however, 

 kind reader, that in that one morning I had found the perfect 

 system by which all gamblers hope some day or other to ' break the 

 bank.' More often than not the bank breaks the gamblers, and 

 no system seems to hold good for long. With mine, however, the 

 case has been different, for the longer I have studied the ways of 

 the male birds at nesting time, the more I have been able to perfect 

 my system, and instead of the birds beating me, I am gradually 

 getting the better of them, although to do so I have had to display 

 more than the patience of Job, and have often had to remain with 

 them for hours at a time before obtaining their secret. For the 

 perfect working of my system, however, there is one thing essential 

 and that is a singing male, the lack of which lost me a great prize 

 only this summer (1918), for having located a pair of Cape May 

 Warblers (Dcndroica tigrina) in a certain large wood from June 

 1 1 to 2G, I failed to find the nesting site, as the male could never 

 be found singing. I would come across him (only once with the 

 female) often in a certain area of the wood, but he always managed 

 to give me the slip after a time, and his failure to sing never enabled 

 me to follow him up. Not so however with a male Bay-breasted 

 Warbler (Dendroica castanca) that I came across about the same 



