WOOD WARBLERS. 
Mniotiltidae. 
shrubs of our forests and gardens don their varied garments of 
leaves and blossoms. Numerous fairy-like birds, beautiful both in 
color and form, are now busily engaged among the new leaves 
and the flowers in the pursuit of insects, which are nowhere else 
found in such immense numbers. These beautiful woodland minstrels are - 
known to the ornithologist and lover of nature as Woop WaRBLERS. In 
no other name lies such an exhilerating sensation as in the term Warbler, 
and none other is so dear to the heart of every lover of birds as this. 
It always reminds me of my early rambles through that region of central 
and northern Wisconsin, which abounds in beautiful lakes, prattling 
brooks, and cool forests, where the white pine and hemlock raise their 
sombre-colored tops high into the air, where the ground beneath is enamelled with a 
rich mosaic of trailing arbutus, tiarella, uvularia, rue-anemone', goldthread, claytonia, 
spicy wintergreen or checker-berry, partridge-vine, twin-leaf, and club-moss, where the 
blood-root, the wake-robin or wood-lily’, aud a host of other spring flowers grow out 
of the rich mold. I enjoy to remember also the gorgeous masses of azaleas, kalmias, 
and rhododendrons fringing the banks of the cool mountain streams and frequently 
clothing whole mountain-sides of the southern Alleghanies with dazzling hues and green 
verdure. I often call to mind the magnificent Magnolia grandiflora with its broad 
evergreen leaves and large white blossoms exhaling a powerful fragrance, and amid 
which our Wood Warblers on tieir way to the North seem to revel. The tea-olive, the 
gardenia, the orange, the palms, the glorious tea roses, the banana-shrub*, which for six 
weeks in spring is covered with thousands of brown miniature magnolia blooms, whose 
deliciously pungent odor is the very harmony of perfume, and other semi-tropical plants 
of the Gulf region;— the sweet-scented rosy-white clusters of the wild crab-tree, the flower- 
ing white-thorns of the woods, which in a distance remind the observer of a cloud of 
mist, the blooming fruit-trees of the northern gardens; the Cherokee rose hedges of 
southern Louisiana and Georgia, the azalea and camellia gardens of South Carolina, 
all these crowd into my mind, when I hear the name Wood Warbler. 
1 Thalictrum anemonoides. 2 Trillium. 3 Magnolia fuscata. 
