Life histories of North American wood warblers, Part 1 (of 2)Bent, Arthur Cleveland
Science
Life histories of North American wood warblers, Part 1 (of 2)
Bent, Arthur Cleveland
Birds -- North America; Passeriformes; Wood warblers
saw a female, closely followed by a male, fly from a bush of spirea
(_Spirea discolor_) to the top of a small pine, and busy itself on a
small horizontal limb partially concealed by pine needles. She soon
returned to the spirea, followed by the male, which did not enter the
bush but perched on a pine branch near by. The female again flew with a
dry flower-stem in her bill, from the bush directly to the pine, where a
nest was in process of construction. * * * A few days after, a forest
fire drove me from my camp, and it was not until July 1 that I was able
to visit the nest. The female was sitting, and when frightened from the
nest, kept hovering about, but made no sound. The male did not appear at
all. The nest was compactly built and placed on a small horizontal
branch, about forty feet from the ground, and about six feet from the
top of the tree. The eggs, four in number, were in an advanced state of
incubation. * * * The body and walls of the nest are composed of
rootlets and flower stalks of _Spirea discolor_, and the inner lining
consists of fine rootlets and a very small quantity of vegetable down.
It is a compactly built structure, measuring about 4 inches in outer
diameter by 1-3/4 inches in depth; the inner cup measures 2 inches in
width by 1-1/8 inches in depth.
A few years later, O. W. Howard (1899) reported finding four nests in
the Huachuca Mountains; one was about 30 feet up in the fork of a large
limb of a red fir; another was in a sugar pine near the extremity of a
limb and about 30 feet from the ground; a third was near the end of a
long slender limb of a yellow pine, about 50 feet up, and well concealed
among the long pine needles; the fourth was on a branch of a red fir,
not far from the trunk, and over 60 feet from the ground.
F. C. Willard (1910), collecting in the Huachucas, says that "short-leaf
pines, long-leaf pines and firs are chosen for the nesting sites." One
female that he watched building her nest "was gathering rootlets at the
time and seemed very particular about them, picking up and dropping
several before selecting one which she thought satisfactory. This she
carried into a dense growth at the tip of a branch of a large fir about
one hundred yards away. The male was singing and feeding in a tree
close by. After a few trips with material the female would fly into the
tree where he was and let him feed her. This is the only time I have
observed nest building going on and the male not following the female in
her flights." In his description of the nest, he says: "It is supported
by ten small live twigs from the size of a pencil down, all growing from
a branch about five eighths of an inch in diameter. It is composed
outwardly of moss and pine bud hulls with plant down scattered thruout.
The proportion of this latter increases until the the lining is reacht
where it forms a felt like a hummingbird's nest. This lining is
supplemented with a few very fine rootlets."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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