GIS MICHIGAN BIRD LIVI. 
feathers. The eggs are three to five, creamy white, spotted with brown and 
lilac, often with a few black specks, and average .67 by .49 inches. 
This specics is mainly insectivorous, and, owing to its abundance and 
the considerable period over which its visits extend during migration, it 
is one of the most valuable warblers in holding orchard insects in check. 
Both spring and fall it may be found gorging itself with plant lice and 
searching the twigs und leaves for span-worms, leaf-rollers and harmful 
insects of every kind. It also eats berries and possibly a few seeds, being 
particularly fond of the berries of the poison-ivy, and to a less extent of 
those of the junipers. 
TECHNICAL DESCRIPTION. 
Adult male: Wntire upper parts bright olive-green, usually without spots or streaks; 
throat and upper breast clear black, this continued as a series of streaks and spots ulong 
cither side; remainder of breast. and belly white or yellowish-white; sides of head and 
neck mainly bright yellow, with a dusky streak through the eye and a similar shade on 
the ear-coverts; wings and tail dusky, the former with two white burs ucross the coverts, 
the latter with the inner webs of the two outer pairs of feathers entirely white. Iemale 
similar, but with the black and yellow areas more or less obscured by gray or whitish tips 
of the feathers, and throat and breast often washed with yellowish. Young of the year 
resemble the female, but the markings are still more obscure. 
Length of adult male 4.35 to 5.410 inches; wing 2.10 to 2.55; tail 1.90 to 2.05; female 
somewhat smuller. : 
282. Kirtland’s Warbler. Dendroica kirtlandi (/uird). (670) 
Synonyms: Jack-pine Warbler, Jack-pine Bird.—Sylvicola Wirtlandii, Buird, 1852. 
—Dendroica, or Dendreeca, kirtlandi of other authors. 
Plate LX. 
Our only warbler which combines black-streaked pale yellow under 
parts, black-streaked bluish-gray upper parts, and white-marked outer 
tail-feathers. In addition, it has white on both eyelids, forming practically 
u white eye-ring, and the whitish wing-bars, if present at all, are narrow, 
dull and inconspicuous. 
Distribution.—Eastern United States from Florida to northern Michigan 
during migration, and west to Missouri, Wisconsin and Minnesota; breeding, 
so far as known, only on the jack-pine plains of Michigan north of 44°. 
Winters in the Bahamas. 
This has been considered the rarest warbler of the United States, and 
although described in 1852, from a specimen collected by Chas. Pease near 
Cleveland, Ohio, May 18, 1851, its summer home remained a mystery 
until 1903, when it was shown to be a not uncommon bird on the jack-pine 
plains of northern Michigan, where nests, eggs and young were taken by 
Mr. Norman A. Wood of Ann Arbor, Michigan. The bird was named 
Kirtland’s Warbler in honor of J. P. Kirtland of Cleveland, in acknow- 
ledgment of his great services in the promotion of knowledge of the natural 
history of the Mississippi Valley. Although the specimen above alluded 
to is the type specimen, a bird of the same kind had been taken at sca, 
near the Bahama Islands, by 8. Cabot, Jr., probably in 1840. From this 
time until 1898 single specimens were taken at rare intervals in the eastern 
United States to the number of nineteen or twenty in all, while it was 
discovered that the bird wintered in the Bahama Islands, where u total 
of about fifty specimens (probably just 55) have been taken. 
