When the beech buds swell and the jessamine puts forth its little yellow trumpets to announce that spring has actually come, the first great wave comes flooding into the awakening woods. Here come the first arrivals, both sexes in coats of grayish blue, with shirtwaists of brilliant yellow, the male distinguished by a patch of rufous of an irregular crescent shape across the lower part of the throat and upper part of the breast. On fine sunshiny days the parula warbler, for that is his name, loves the topmost branches of the tallest trees; if the day is gloomy he comes down to the lower branches, affording a better opportunity to study him. His only note at these times is an insect-like buzz much in keeping with his diminutive size. In the lowlands the Halesia or silver bell is putting out its graceful pendulous racemes of purest white, and it is time to look for the next migrant, the hooded warbler, one of the largest and finest of his race. A V of brilliant yellow coming down to the bill, covering the forehead and running backwards past the eye, bordered by a well defined band of intense black, and a back and tail of green slightly tinted with olive make him a marked bird. Unlike the parula, he cares nothing for treetops or sunshine; a perch on a swinging rattan vine or in a shrub in the dark woods hard by a canebrake is good enough for him. As soon as the hooded warbler appears we will see the black and white creeping warbler, the connecting link (so to speak) between the creepers and warblers in both appearance and habits. Like our common brown creeper, he loves the dense woods, but unlike him seems to prefer the tops and higher branches. Alternate patches and streaks of white and black without a suggestion of the yellow or olive green so characteristic of his genus make his identification easy. His note is simple and short; in fact the sounds that he emits in his journeys are scarcely worth being called a song.