THE WARBLERS 



189 



It is not at all essential that such tiny, incon- 

 spicuous creatures as warblers should be recog- 

 nized and correctly named at sight. Already 

 a million warblers have died to make holi- 

 days for collectors. Not long since I received 

 from an egg-dealer a circular advertising the 

 following eggs for sale: 



Worm-Eating Warbler.... 84 sets, 416 eggs. 



Yellow Warbler 94 " 388 " 



Oven-Bird 10. r > " 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 count- 

 ing possible progeny, and did not one dollar's 

 worth of good to the "cause of science," or any 

 other public interest. Already, 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, wherever insects abound, from 

 the southern edge of the arctic Barren Grounds 

 to southern Mexico. In her very scholarly and 

 useful book entitled " Birds of the Western United 

 States," Mrs. Florence Merriam Bailey enumer- 

 ates 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 diffi- 

 culty of becoming acquainted with the different 

 species will begin to appear. For present pur- 

 poses, the whole Family can be very fairly rep- 

 resented by three species. Two of them are of 

 universal distribution, and the third (the chat) 

 is nearly so. 



The Yellow Warbler, or Summer Yellow- 

 bird, 1 is chosen as the type of about sixty species 



1 Den-dro'i-ca aes'ti-va. Length, 5 inches. 



of small wood warblers each of which is called 

 "Warbler" with a descriptive name prefixed, 

 such as palm warbler, prairie warbler, Calaveras 

 warbler, etc. It is of a bright, greenish-yellow 

 color, and is easily recognized on the wing. On 

 the Western prairie farms, the boys call it a " Wild 

 Canary," because it strongly resembles the orange 

 yellow phases of that popular cage-bird. As if 

 courting acquaintance with man, it loves to fre- 

 quent the roadside thickets, the edges of woods, 

 and even the orchard and garden. 



The beauty of this bird far surpasses its min- 

 strelsy, for it is but an indifferent singer. The 

 fact is, however, that it has so much work to do 

 in catching insects it has little time for music; 

 for it will be noticed throughout the bird-world 

 that the most diligent insect-catchers are not 

 in the habit of singing over their work. This 

 is due to the same reason that a good deer-hunter 

 does not talk and tell stories while following a 

 trail. 



The Yellow Warbler ranges from the Atlantic 



YELLOW WARBLER. 



to the Pacific, and over practically the whole 

 of North America save the arctic barrens, Alas- 

 ka, and our arid southwestern states. Mrs. 

 Mabel Osgood Wright says "it is one of the par- 

 ticular victims which the cow blackbird selects 

 to foster its random eggs, but the Warbler puts 

 its intelligence effectively to work, and some- 



