Birds -- Tennessee; Natural history -- Outdoor books; Tennessee -- Description and travel
At the season of my visit,--in the latter half of the vernal
migration,--the preponderance of woodland birds, especially of the
birds known as wood warblers, was very striking. Of ninety-three
species observed, twenty-eight belonged to the warbler family. In
this list it was curious to remark the absence of the Nashville and
the Tennessee. The circumstance is significant of the comparative
worthlessness--except from a historical point of view--of locality
names as they are applied to American birds in general. Here were
Maryland yellow-throats, Cape May warblers, Canada warblers, Kentucky
warblers, prairie warblers, palm warblers, Acadian flycatchers,
but not the two birds (the only two, as well as I remember) that
bear Tennessee names.[4] The absence of the Nashville was a matter
of wonderment to me. Dr. Rives, I have since noticed, records it
as only a rare migrant in Virginia. Yet by some route it reaches
eastern New England in decidedly handsome numbers. Its congener,
the blue golden-wing, surprised me in an opposite direction,--by
its commonness, both in the lower country near the river and on
Walden's Ridge. This, too, is a rare bird in Virginia; so much so
that Dr. Rives has never met with it there. In certain places about
Chattanooga it was as common as it is locally in the towns about
Boston, where, to satisfy a skeptical friend, I once counted eleven
males in song in the course of a morning's walk. That the Chattanooga
birds were on their breeding grounds I had at the time no question,
although I happened upon no proof of the fact.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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