_Winter._--Many of the dusky warblers, perhaps most of them, desert the islands in the fall when they become dry and uninviting, for the winter spreading widely on the mainland as far north as the San Francisco Bay region and inland to Merced County. Dr. Joseph Grinnell (1898) says: "This subspecies appears in the vicinity of Pasadena in the oak regions and along the arroyos in large numbers during August, and even by the middle of July. Remains in diminishing numbers through the winter; the latest specimen noted in the spring was secured by me, Feb. 29 ('96)." VERMIVORA RUFICAPILLA RUFICAPILLA (Wilson) EASTERN NASHVILLE WARBLER PLATES 16, 17 HABITS Alexander Wilson discovered this species near Nashville, Tenn., and gave it the name Nashville warbler. Baird, Brewer, and Ridgway (1874) say of its early history: "For a long while our older naturalists regarded it as a very rare species, and knew nothing as to its habits or distribution. Wilson, who first met with it in 1811, never found more than three specimens, which he procured near Nashville, Tenn. Audubon only met with three or four, and these he obtained in Louisiana and Kentucky. These and a few others in Titian Peale's collection, supposed to have been obtained in Pennsylvania, were all he ever saw. Mr. Nuttall at first regarded it as very rare, and as a Southern species." This is not strange when we stop to consider that this bird is more or less irregular in its occurrence, apparently fluctuating in numbers in different localities and perhaps choosing different routes of migration. Its record here in eastern Massachusetts illustrates this point. Thomas Nuttall never saw the bird while he lived in Cambridge, from 1825 to 1834. Dr. Samuel Cabot, who lived there from 1832 to 1836, told William Brewster (1906) that he was sure that it did not occur regularly in eastern Massachusetts at that time. According to Brewster: Soon afterwards a few birds began to appear every season. They increased in numbers, gradually but steadily, until they had become so common that in 1842 he obtained ten specimens in the course of a single morning. In 1868, and for some fifteen years later, I found Nashville Warblers breeding rather numerously in Waltham, Lexington, Arlington and Belmont, usually in dry and somewhat barren tracts sparsely covered with gray birches, oaks or red cedars, or with scattered pitch pines. A few birds continue to occupy certain of these stations, but in all of the towns just mentioned the Nashville Warbler is less common and decidedly less generally distributed in summer now than it was twenty-five or thirty years ago.