eaten UPD U BIOgNe biUelels Heb N 9 
owners and throwing out eggs and young. (Only near Quincy, IIll., are 
bluebirds more abundant than formerly, owing to the bluebird benefactor, 
Mr. Thomas E. Musselmann.) As already seen redheads are killed by 
autos on the highways, and swallows have to go because of the introduction 
of farm machinery, which does away with horses and manure piles, the 
chief breeding places of flies. An irreparable loss to the attractiveness of 
the rural scene! Also the vanishing of the whippoorwill is easily under- 
stood when one sees how in the agricultural sections of its former range 
the farmers use their woodlots for pasturing cattle and hogs. 
But what about the decrease in numbers of wood warblers, flycatchers 
and vireos? That is another calamity of the first order, both from an 
aesthetic and economic standpoint. What mysterious changes are taking 
place in the biological, atmospheric and physical factors and conditions of 
our planet? I fear the extensive dusting of fields, orchards and citrus 
groves with DDT and other insect repellants has something to do with it. 
Florida is looked upon as being a bird paradise. That was true for- 
merly, but it certainly is so no longer away from the two coast lines. In 
the five and one-half years that I have lived here I have yet to see a gray- 
headed nuthatch, the Florida chickadee, painted bunting, blue grosbeak, and 
others which are supposed to breed here; others, like the gray kingbird, 
summer tanager and Audubon’s caracara only once, also the cedar wax- 
wing from the north. The Florida and other wrens, white-eyed towhee 
and vireo, brown thrasher, catbird and others are few and far between. 
When I first came here loggerhead shrikes and sparrow hawks were more 
numerous along the roadsides than now. When driving to Orlando, 13 
miles away, one often sees no more than three or four birds along the high- 
way in any month of the year. Sometimes there are quite a few northern 
chipping, field and vesper sparrows to be seen during the “winter” months. 
One would think that at least during the migration months there would be 
a teeming birdlife here. Even that is not true. I live in a rather attrac- 
tive locality, between lakes, woods and citrus groves. Yet I see but few 
warblers and thrushes; four to five small groups of five to ten warblers 
each pass through the trees overhead in a season. All the warblers I have 
seen in five years are the following: yellow palm, Cape May, blackburnian, 
blue-winged, redstart, one to five of each, and palm and myrtle which stay 
here all winter; but this past winter I have seen only about ten palm and 
no myrtle warblers. The parula, yellow-throated and prairie warblers 
(subspecies?) have also appeared to the tune of five to ten of each, but 
in their proper subspecies they should be here all the time as they are 
species breeding in Florida. Hawks and owls, hairy and downy wood- 
peckers are rarely seen, and in the many sloughs and swampy ponds that 
one passes when driving I have never yet seen a gallinule or rail, although 
in certain stretches of the canals from lake to lake, in the bonnet areas 
lining them, they may be seen in numbers. I think I found the metropolis 
of purple gallinules in one of them, about fifty in a stretch of a half-mile. 
Of course, the colony-nesting egrets and herons are plentiful to abundant 
in their chosen heronries, such as the one in Lake Butler, within view of 
where I live. 
