The Tolmie Warbler 



is somewhat relaxed, and a little judicious screeping in the shrubbery 

 will call up platoons of these inquisitive Warblers. 



Owing partly to the caution of the sitting female, and more to 

 the density of its cover, the nest of the Tolmie Warbler is not often 

 found. When approached, the bird glides away silently from her nest, 

 and begins feeding ostentatiously in the neighboring bushes. This of 

 itself is enough to arouse suspicion in an instructed mind, for the exhi- 

 bition is plainly gratuitous. But the brush keeps the secret well, or, 

 if it is forced, we find a bulky, loose-built affair or coarse dead grasses 

 and rootlets, lined with black rootlets or horsehair, and placed either 

 in an upright fork of a bush, or built around the ascending stems of rank 

 herbage at a few inches, or at most two or three feet, from the ground. 

 Eggs, usually four or five in number, are deposited about the first week 

 in June at the mile high level, and Tolmie babies swarm in July and 

 August, quite beyond the expectation of our oological fore-season. 



The finding of a Tolmie Warbler's nest is almost always a happy 

 accident. It is, therefore, such nests as have happened to be placed 

 near trails or mountain camps which get found and reported. Thus, 

 Mr. Mailliard reports 1 a nest with five eggs taken May 7th near San 

 Geronimo, from a tangle of blackberry vines in a railroad right-of-way, 

 whose boundary fence he was following. Miss Margaret Wythe found 

 a nest with four eggs in the Yosemite Valley within three feet of the 

 camp trail, and noted that incubation consumed eleven days, with 

 the birds away in eight and nine days thereafter. The nest given in 

 the illustration was shown me by the ladies of the Sierra Club on the 

 18th day of July on the Simpson Meadows (in eastern Fresno County). 



A word of explanation regarding the change of name from Mac- 

 gillivray to Tolmie is in order. J. K. Townsend discovered the bird 

 and really published it first, saying, 2 "I dedicate the species to my 

 friend, W. T. Tolmie, Esq., of Fort Vancouver." Audubon, being 

 entrusted with Townsend's specimens, but disregarding the owner's prior 

 rights, published the bird independently, and tardily, as it happened, 

 as Sylvia macgillivrayi, by which specific name it was long known to 

 ornithologists. Macgillivray was a Scotch naturalist who never saw 

 America, but Tolmie was at that time a surgeon and later a factor of 

 "the Honorable the Hudson Bay Company," and he clearly deserves 

 remembrance at our hands for the friendly hospitality and cooperation 

 which he invariably extended to men of science. 



Condor, Vol. XI., March. 1909, p. 66. 

 : " Narrative," April, 1839, p. 343. 



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