Gates—SuMMER Biro Lire IN ILLINOIs. Wy 
number of crested flycatchers and a few kingbirds. The king- 
birds are essentially marginal in their position in the willows. 
The wood pewees are interior birds, while the crested fly- 
catcher and the phoebe partake somewhat of the character of 
each. The blackbird is second in importance and the vireo 
family is third. The red-winged blackbirds make their pres- 
ence known at all hours of the day by their incessant “Kong- 
querree.’ Of the vireos the red-eyed and yellow-throated are 
tather scarce, but the warbling vireo is very abundant. Altho 
abundant it is ordinarily seldom seen, as it gleans in the dense 
foliage for the many insects that are present. It harmonizes 
exceedingly well with its background, but its presence can 
always be detected by its characteristic sweet song, which is 
kept up nearly all day long. 
To this association may be accredited the warblers that re- 
mained here during the summer. Two warblers, the prothon- 
otary and the Northern yellow-throat, were quite uniformly 
distributed over the bottomland wooded areas, altho the 
former was by far the more abundant. Three other species of 
warblers were localized in the Matanzas bog, and with the ex- 
ception of one redstart in the Spoon river bottoms were seen 
nowhere else. These were the redstart, the Kentucky and the 
hooded warblers. As this bog harbored also the yellow-throat 
and the prothonotary, it contained the complete warbler list 
for the summer. The most abundant warbler — and almost the 
most abundant bird in the willows —was the prothonotary 
warbler, which finds a wealth of nesting sites in the many 
rotting willow stumps. These birds keep up a well nigh in- 
cessant chattering thruout the day. They also make their 
presence known by rapid darts from one tree to another, their 
orange to yellow colored heds and bodies appearing like gems 
in the green foliage. They quite often make excursions across 
the water during the course of which they usually fly but 
little above its surface. They are at their best when they are 
percht at the end of a limb on a dead tree, when they stand 
out quite vividly against the blue background of sky. Toward 
