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NASHVILLE WARBLER 



Fall Migration. The arrival of migrants south of their breeding 

 grounds has been noted at Chicago, 111., August 16, 1896 ; Beaver, Pa., 

 September 5, 1903; Ossining, N. Y., August n; Englewood, N. J., 

 August 26, 1887; Washington, D. C, September 5; French Creek, 

 W. Va., September 7, 1890; St. Louis, Mo., September 17, 1885, and 

 at Gainesville, Texas, October n, 1885. 



The Bird and its Haunts. Wilson, the discoverer of this species, 

 found only the three specimens, taken near Nashville, Tennessee, on 

 which his description was based; and, in the early part of the last 

 century it was considered a rare bird. Brewster 5 , quoting Samuel 

 Cabot, says that soon after 1836 "a few birds began to appear every 

 season. They increased in numbers, gradually but steadily, until they 

 had become so common that in 1842 he obtained ten specimens in the 

 course of a single morning." 



Recounting his own experience in the Cambridge region, 

 Brewster 5 adds: "In 1868, and for some fifteen years later, I found 

 Nashville Warblers breeding rather numerously in Waltham, Lexing- 

 ton, Arlington and Belmont, usually in dry and somewhat barren 

 tracts sparsely covered with gray birches, oaks or red cedars, or with 

 scattered pitch pines. A few birds continued to occupy certain of 

 these stations, but in all of the towns just mentioned the Nashville 

 Warbler is less common and decidedly less generally distributed in 

 summer now than it was twenty-five or thirty years ago." 



Gerald Thayer writes : " 'Birch Warbler' would be a good name 

 for this bird as it appears in the Monadnock region where it breeds 

 abundantly. For here it is nowhere so common as in abandoned fields 

 and mountain pastures half smothered by small gray birches. From 

 the airy upper story of these low and often dense birch copses the 

 Nashvilles sing ; and among the club-mosses and ferns, and the hard- 



