BY THE WAYSIDE. 
3 
the indistinct chestnut-colored mark which 
showed him to be the palm warbler. After 
looking him over carefully and noting h'is 
markings, I opened my hand and away he 
darted as from the jaws of Death. 
The naturalist who named the palm warb¬ 
ler must surely have met him here in the 
* 
tropics; he is a ground bird in habit and you 
may find him in every palm grove in this re¬ 
gion, h'opping about in the shade of the wav¬ 
ing trees. But the Tropics are not his home; 
I have found him in September on Lake Su¬ 
perior; but even then he was far on his way 
to this summerland; his nesting place, his 
home, is far northward in British Columbia, 
on the shores of the Hudson Bay. What a 
wonderful thing it is to us human beings that 
this minute creature, this little feathered 
body that seems as frail as a flower, should 
have the muscular power to traverse twice 
in the year the hundreds and thousands of 
miles which separate the Arctic Circle and 
»the Tropic of Cancer! What a wonderful 
thing that the brain beneath this chestnut 
crown should guide the little traveler unerr¬ 
ingly through storm and moonlight (for these 
smaller birds journey by night) over moun¬ 
tain and valley, across wide expanse of ocean, 
across the Gulf Stream itself, to this speck of 
an island in the sea! 
The palm warblers are the commonest of 
the American birds which winter in the Ba¬ 
hamas, but they are by no means the only 
ones. I find the prairie warbler—a species 
closely related to the palm—‘abundant about 
Nassau; one familiar Maryland yellow-throat 
is not uncommon, and I have seen several yel¬ 
low- throated warblers—beautiful birds which 
make their home in our southern states. 
Another Canadian iJ the yellow-billed sap- 
sucker. This is a bird which I asociate with 
the raven and the red-tailed hawk, a dweller 
in remote mountains, a lover of the forest and 
of solitude. The sapsucker’s shrill cry brings 
to my mind’s eye a bleak mountain-top and 
its gaunt tree-trunks, a wide out-look over 
green mountain slopes and blue lakes nestled 
between; it recalls the delightful rest in the 
August sunshine, after a rough scramble to 
the summit. How strange then to meet the 
same bird here on the threshold of the Trop¬ 
ics, on a speck of a coral island! But it is a 
silent bird which flits through the orange 
groves; I do not hear the wild cry of the 
north woods, and I have to keep my eyes 
open or he escapes me as he clings like a liz- 
zard to the tree trunk and hops nimbly to the 
farther side to hide from sight. 
If T were to continue in this manner, speak- 
ini;' of one bird after another which I have 
known at home and which I meet here in my 
walks. I should make this paper much too 
long; and I shall have to content myself with 
briefer notes of some others. A few king 
fishers haunt the brackish lakes and mangrove 
swamps. To what quarter of our hemisphere 
does this winged arrow not penetrate! This 
surely is his paradise, where the winter long 
is but a succession of halcyon days. The 
brackish lakes harbor other wanderers, one 
duck at least (one smaller river broad-bill), 
one coot, and a greebe. The beaches seem at 
this season almost forsaken by shore-birds; 
I have, however, seen the least sand-piper, 
and I have heard plover-like calls, though 1 
have as yet seen no plovers. Our cat-birds 
lurk in the thickets; we sometimes hear their 
unmistakable mewing when we are out driv¬ 
ing. The cat-birds are even shyer here than at 
home, and it was only after repeated endeav¬ 
ors that I at last clapped my eyes on one of 
them. These birds, with the Savanna spar¬ 
row, which frequents the open fields about 
the town, and the laughing gull which some¬ 
times visits the harbor, complete my list of 
winter visitors. 
There are many interesting water birds; 
some, like the exquisite violet-throated hum¬ 
mingbird, resembling our own birds closely; 
others, such as the ani (a great black fellow 
allied to the cuckoos) and the honey-creeper 
(a warbler like fruit-eater) entirely distinct 
from any birds of our country. 
This morning for the first time I met with 
a flock of warblers (palm warblers, they 
were). These birds abound; we have seen them 
singly or in groups of two or three every day 
for weeks past; but now, like us humans, 
they are preparing for the long homeward 
journey. The wonderful impulse has siezed 
y)hem; in a few days or in a few weeks at 
most the little crafts will be launched, the lit¬ 
tle sails will be spread in the moonlight, and 
away they will go, northward, northward, 
northward, and homeward. 
Bayard H. Christy. 
Nassau, Bahama Islands, March' 3, 1905. 
