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
Troup D. Perry (1887), with his friend George Noble, found no less than
24 nests near Savannah, Ga., in 1887; some of these were in gall or
myrtle bushes and one was in a saw palmetto 2-1/2 feet high. S. A.
Grimes has sent us a photograph of a nest on the broad leaf of a saw
palmetto (pl. 7). Albert J. Kirn (1918) says of the nesting sites of
Swainson's warbler in Oklahoma: "A well shaded clump of trees in the
woods, such a place as would suggest itself for a Wood Thrush, yet not
exactly so, with considerable 'buck brush' undergrowth, but no grass or
weeds is selected for a nesting site. In the top of this 'buck brush'
usually about two feet high the nest is built; about half of the nests
found were close to the river bank--the Little Caney River. All but two
were built in the brushy undergrowth. These two were fastened to briers
and slender brush and were higher up, 3.5 and 4 feet."
F. M. Jones wrote to Brooks and Legg (1942) of a nest found in
southwestern Virginia: "This nest was in a very dense growth of
rhododendron bushes close to a stream of water where the sunlight never
penetrated. It was 5 ft. 6 in. up, built in the forks of a slender beech
limb which grew across the top of a rhododendron bush (_R. maximum_) and
partly supported by the top of the rhododendron. * * * The outside of
the nest measured 7 in. wide by 5 in. deep and the inside 2 in. wide by
1-13/16 in. deep."
It is evident, from the above and other similar accounts that, at higher
elevations northward and westward, Swainson's warbler nests in bushes
and vines where there are no canes to be found.]
_Eggs._--Swainson's warbler usually lays three eggs; sets of four are
rare and of five very rare. Although there are records of nests
containing two incubated eggs or two young birds, these probably
represent incomplete sets or cases where an egg or a nestling has been
destroyed.
Eggs are quite globular, the two ends sometimes scarcely
distinguishable; the shell is thick and has a distinct polish; the
ground color is white with a bluish tinge; however, a set of three eggs
in the writer's collection had a faint greenish tinge, while several
observers describe sets of pale pink or buffy white.
Rarely, spotted eggs are found. Wayne (1910) says: "Spotted eggs are,
however, very rare and I have found only four or five nests containing
them." The only spotted egg the writer has found is in the set referred
to above; of these, two are immaculate, while the third is "faintly
though distinctly speckled around the larger end with reddish brown"
(Dingle, 1926).
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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