BLACK AND WHITE WARBLER. 



striped irregularly with white; under parts white. Fe- 

 male similarly marked but with less black beneath, and 

 a rusty black or brownish tone on the sides. Nest on 

 the ground at the base of a stump or at the root end of 

 some overthrown tree; it is woven of strips of bark, 

 plant fibres, and grasses, and is lined with rootlets, 

 hairs, etc. Egg white with specks of varying brown at 

 the larger end. This Warbler is distributed throughout 

 eastern North America; it winters from the Gulf States 

 to Central America. 



The song of the Black and White Warbler, if one can 

 call any of the tsippings of the Warblers by the dignified 

 term song, is a series of two distinctly separate high 

 tones approximately at highest C and the second whole 

 tone higher, off the piano keyboard. These two tones 

 are wagged back and forth a number of times, and that 

 constitutes the song: 



there is nothing more to it, and yet an acute observer 

 vill notice that there is something peculiar about the 

 accent: it is shifted; the wag is upward in the first half 

 of the song and downward in the last half. The bird 

 is somehow or other overcome with an exuberance of 

 high spirits, and lisps hysterically ! There is not a person, 

 who, when he heartily laughs, does not do something 



very similar. We say, "Mr. was convulsed with 



laughter," but we took no note of the nature of the 

 convulsion; if we did, we would remember that there 

 was a continuous shifting of accent as well as tone in 

 the laugh. Some Black and White Warblers are, of 

 course, young, and these have not yet advanced so far 

 as a shift in the accent of the song in fact, they do not, 

 to use a popular term, know it all. The musical nota- 

 tion shows the character of the song perfectly, but I 

 must emphasize the fact that the tones are altogether 

 too high to be accurately located on the staff: 



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