CHAPTER X. 



THE WARBLERS AND THE VIREOS. 

 THE WOOD WARBLERS, OR AMERICAN WARBLERS. 



THE beautiful-plumaged American warblers (Mniotiltidce) 

 form next to the largest family of our native birds. Nearly all 

 of them are small. As a group they are abundant and widely 

 distributed, migratory, and insectivorous. In many species 

 the plumage varies greatly with the age and sex. There are 

 about sixty North American representatives of the family. 

 u With tireless industry do the warblers befriend the human 

 race, 1 ' writes Dr. Elliott Coues ; " their unconscious zeal plays 

 due part in the nice adjustment of nature's forces, helping to 

 bring about that balance of vegetable and insect life without 

 which agriculture would be in vain. They visit the orchard 

 when the apple and pear, the peach, plum, and cherry are in 

 bloom, seeming to revel carelessly amid the sweet-scented 

 and delicately tinted blossoms, but never faltering in their 

 good work. They peer into the crevices of the bark, scruti- 

 nize each leaf, and explore the very heart of the buds to 

 detect, drag forth, and destroy these tiny creatures, singly in- 

 significant, collectively a scourge, which prey upon the hopes 

 of the fruit-grower, and which if undisturbed would bring his 

 care to naught. Some warblers flit incessantly in the terminal 

 foliage of the tallest trees ; others hug close to the scored 

 trunks and gnarled boughs of the forest kings ; some peep 

 from the thicket, the coppice, the impenetrable mantle of 

 shrubbery that decks tiny water-courses, playing at hide and 

 seek with all comers ; others, more humble still, descend to 

 the ground, where they glide, with pretty, mincing steps and 

 affected turning of the head this way and that, their delicate 

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