YELLOW PALM WARBLER ' 217 



although it is found commonly in the West Indies in winter, is still 

 more numerous in the United States than hypochrysea, which rarely 

 ventures beyond our limits. About Gainesville, Fla., an occasional 

 individual of the Yellow Palm was seen with the loose flocks of 

 palmarum, fifteen of the former to at least several thousands of the 

 latter being observed there during a single winter. 



Brewster says : "Yellow Palm Warblers visit the Cambridge region 

 with unfailing regularity in spring and autumn, although their numbers 

 vary greatly from year to year. * * * j^ spring they associate 

 freely with Myrtle Warblers, and hence frequent much the same 

 places, although they resort rather less to upland woods and are even 

 more given to haunting thickets near water, and to venture out into 

 fields and pastures where they sometimes occur hundreds of yards 

 from any cover. Their favorite haunts in autumn are barren tracts 

 sparsely covered with gray birches." 



Gerald Thayer writes: "Earliest among Monadnock's spring- 

 arriving Warblers is the Myrtle and close behind it comes this beauti- 

 ful, ruddy-crowned, golden-browed, and red-streaked, golden-breasted 

 'tail-tipper' of field-borders and bushy roadsides; a bird of the semi- 

 open ground and the first tier of scattered woody growth above it. 



"With a methodic regularity which almost saves the action from 

 the look of nervousness, his greenish tail is forever swinging up and 

 down. Ducks and Motmots, and some other birds really wag their 

 tail, from side to side; but it is a far commoner trick to jerk or wave 

 it up and down, as is the way of the Yellow Palm and Palm and 

 several other eastern Warblers. The two 'Palnls' come nearest to being 

 'continuous performers' of the trick, but even they have occasional 

 lapses into quietness, in the midst of their flitting and feed- 

 ing." (Thayer, MS.) 



O. W. Knight^, who first discovered this species breeding in the 

 United States, writes that in Maine, in the nesting season, this species 

 "may be confidently looked for in sphagnunr-hackmatack bogs with 

 open stretches, within the Canadian fauna sections of the State. So 

 far as known, the birds are found in what may be perhaps termed 

 loosely aggregated colonies." 



Song. — Knight^ writes that in Maine the song is heard until well 

 into June. "It consists of a series of trills which may be rendered 

 tsee tsee tsee tsee tsee, and the call and alarm notes are mere chips 

 uttered with various intonations" {Knight^). 



"The Yellow Palm sometimes sings freely on migration. As one 

 hears it then, it ranks low in the scale of full-voiced Warblers, or 



