336 MEMOIRS OF THE NUTTALL ORNITHOLOGICAL CLUB. 



207. Dendroica pensylvanica (Linn.). 

 Chestnut-sided Warbler. Chestnut-side. 



Abundant summer resident. 



SEASONAL OCCURRENCE. 



April 29, 1888, one male taken, Belmont, F. BoUes. 



May 5 — September 10. 

 September 20, i8gi, one seen, Lexington, W. Faxon. 



NESTING dates. 



May 26 — June 5. 



The Chestnut-sided Warbler, hke the Nashville Warbler, has apparently 

 become common and widespread since the days of Wilson, Audubon and Nuttall. 

 These and other early ornithologists agreed in considering it a positively rare 

 species. Nuttall states that "on the 22d of May (1830), a pair appeared to 

 have fixed on their summer abode, near the summit of the Blue Hills of Mil- 

 ton," and that "on the 27th of June (1831) I observed a pair selecting food for 

 their young, with their usual address and activity, by the margin of a bushy and 

 secluded swamp on the west side of Fresh Pond, in this vicinity."^. He also 

 mentions a deserted and empty nest which he believed, evidently with good rea- 

 son, had belonged to a Chestnut-sided Warbler, and which was found "in a 

 hazel copse in a wood in Acton." But these few instances were apparently all 

 that he was able to give of the occurrence of the bird in eastern Massachusetts. 



Dr. Samuel Cabot told me a year or two before his death that when he was 

 at Harvard College (i 832-1 836) the Chestnut-sided Warbler was certainly very 

 rare in eastern Massachusetts, and that for some years later it was not common 

 although it gradually but steadily increased in numbers after 1835. He added 

 that his brother Mr. J. Elliot Cabot found what he believed to have been the 

 first fully identified specimen of its nest, probably in the neighborhood of either 

 Milton or Cambridge, although he did not mention the exact locality. 



My personal acquaintance with Chestnut-sided Warblers began in 1866 

 when, on June 4, I chanced upon a nest containing three eggs, on the borders 



' T. Nuttall, Manual of the Omith,ology of the United States and of Canada. The Land Birds, 

 1832, 381. 



