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 105 “ 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- 
