282 PERCHERS AND SINGERS 



Worm-Eating Warbler 84 sets, 416 eggs. 



Yellow Warbler 94 " 388 " 



Oven-Bird . . 105 " 458 " 



Yellow-Breasted Chat 139 " 521 " 



Kentucky Warbler 210 " 917 " 



Total for 51 species ? . . 1,274 sets, 5,433 eggs. 



It is such wanton destruction as this which makes me 

 "down" on egg-collecting. It is safe .to say that the taking 

 of those 5,433 warbler eggs robbed the farms and forests of 

 New York state of that number of useful birds, not counting 

 possible progeny, and did not do one dollar's worth of good to 

 the "cause of science" or any other public interest. Al- 

 ready poor "science" has an awful load of crimes against 

 nature to answer for. Do not add to it without very strong 

 justification. 



The members of the Warbler Family, commonly called 

 wood warblers, are distributed all over North America, wher- 

 ever insects abound, from the southern edge of the Arctic 

 Barren Grounds to southern Mexico. In her very useful 

 book, entitled "Birds of the Western United States," Mrs. 

 Florence Merriam Bailey enumerates forty species; and 

 Mr. Frank M. Chapman, in his "Birds of Eastern North 

 America," gives fifty-two. Of these, however, twenty-one 

 are duplicated, and therefore the whole number of warblers 

 described in the two handbooks is seventy-one. When we 

 consider the fact that about sixty of those species are very 

 small birds, of uniform size, and many of them quite un- 

 marked by striking special colors, the difficulty of becoming 

 acquainted with the different species will begin to appear. 

 For present purposes, the whole Family can be very fairly 



