t^O BkeWster oil liaclnnaii'i. Warbhr. [April 



Bachman's Warbler. If I reniLMiibcr rightly wc tliil not venture 

 to hope that more than a few of these interesting birds would be 

 taken or seen ; accordingly it was an agreeable siu'prise to find 

 them actually common along the Suwanee River,* at nearly 

 every spot where we landed, between the mouth of Santa Fc 

 Creek and a point some fifteen miles north of the Gulf. Here the 

 varied anil luxuriant forests which line the banks of the Suwanee 

 throughout the greater part of its course give place to monotonous 

 and uniformly swampy woods composed chiefly of stunted cy- 

 presses intermingled with bay trees and red cedars and inter- 

 s^Dcrsed with saw-grass savannas. Below this point we searched 

 vainly for our Warbler. Either it had passed northward before 

 we arrived, or the coast country is not to its liking. The latter 

 seemed to us the more probable theory in view of what we had 

 learned of the bird's habits and haunts on the river above. 



Our first specimen, a male, was killed by Mr. Chapman, March 

 12; the first female, March 15. The date of greatest apparent 

 abundance was March 23 when I identified upwards of thirty in- 

 dividuals and took nine males and a female in less than three 

 hours. The species w^as last seen March 34. During the period 

 covered by these dates we traveled about seventy miles down 

 stream (in a generally southerly direction), and rarely spent two 

 days in the same place. 



Nearly or quite all that has been hitherto written about this 

 Warbler would lead one to infer that its favorite haunts are dense 

 thickets, undergrowth, or low^ trees, and that it seldom ventures 

 to any considerable height above the gnnmd.f Our experience, 



*There seems to be no record of the previous occurrence of the species anywhere 

 on the maiiiland of Florida. 



fits discoverer, Dr. Bachman, according to Audubon (Birds Am., Vol. II, p. 93), 

 described it as "a lively, active bird, gliding among the branches of thick bushes, occa- 

 sionally mounting on the wing and seizing insects in the air in the manner of a Fly- 

 catcVier." The numerous specimens which Mr. Atkins has observed at Key West 

 during migration were also "very active, and constantly in motion" and were "found 

 alike in the trees, low bushes, and shrubbery, sometimes on or quite near the ground," 

 seeming to "prefer the heavy and more thickly grown woods to trees or bushes more 

 in the open" (Scott, Auk, VII, Jan. 1890, p. 17). All but two of the thirty-one 

 specimens obtained by Mr. Galbraith on the shores of Lake Ponchartrain, Louisiana, 

 in March, 1888, were taken "in the tops of the sweet-gum, probably attracted by insects 

 found in the buds and blossoms of this tree." The two exceptions were "so low down 

 on the tree on which they were discovered, that their plumage was easily distinguished* 

 (Auk, V, July, 1888, p. 323). The last statement implies, of course, that the other 

 birds were high above the ground, but this point is not distinctly brought out by any- 

 thing in the account from which these quotations are made. 



