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
Alexander Wilson (1832) discovered this warbler on the banks of the
Cumberland River in Tennessee and gave it the common name it has borne
ever since, although it seems inappropriate to name a bird for a State
so far from its main breeding range in Canada. Only two specimens were
ever obtained by him, and he regarded it as a very rare species,
possibly a mere wanderer from some other clime, hence the name
_peregrina_. Audubon never saw more than three individuals, migrants in
Louisiana and at Key West. And Nuttall, it seems, never saw it at all.
Its apparent rarity in those early days was, perhaps, due to the fact
that it is inconspicuously colored and might easily be overlooked or
mistaken for a small plainly colored vireo or for the more common
Nashville warbler; its fluctuation in numbers from year to year in
different places may also have suggested its apparent rarity. Here in
Massachusetts, we have found it very common in certain years and very
scarce in others.
_Spring._--Professor Cooke (1904) says: "In spring migration the
Tennessee warbler is rarely found east of the Alleghenies, nor is it so
common in the Mississippi Valley as during the fall migration." And he
makes the rather surprising statement that "the Biological Survey has
received no notes from the South Atlantic States on the spring migration
of the Tennessee warbler, nor from Alabama, Mississippi, or Louisiana,
though two birds were seen in April in Cuba and some were taken on the
island of Grand Cayman, and the species has been noted several times in
spring at Pensacola, Fla." Yet he gives April 26, 1885, as the date of
its arrival at Rising Fawn, Ga. And H. H. Kopman (1905) writes:
In a small lot of warblers sent Andrew Allison, In the spring of 1902,
from the lighthouse on Chandeleur Island, off the southeast coast of
Louisiana, was a Tennessee Warbler that had struck the lighthouse April
13. While I had some dubious records of the occurrence of the Tennessee
Warbler at New Orleans in the early part of April, it was not until 1903
that I saw the species, in spring, and then in some numbers, singing,
and loitering to a degree that surprised me, for the first of these
transients appeared April 26, and the last was noted May 9. They were
restricted almost to one spot, a thicket of willows beside a pond
in the suburbs of New Orleans. I observed others the latter part of
April, 1905.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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