A backward season brings strangers into close company for a while. A white-throat sings his clear song of the North, and a moment later is answered by an oriole's melody, or the sweet tones of a rose-breasted grosbeak--the latter one of those rarely favoured birds, exquisite in both plumage and song. The glories of our May bird life are the wood warblers, and innumerable they must seem to one who is just beginning his studies; indeed, there are over seventy species that find their way into the United States. Many are named from the distribution of colour upon their plumage--the blue-winged yellow, the black-throated blue, chestnut-sided, bay-breasted, and black poll. Perhaps the two most beautiful--most reflective of bright tropical skies and flowers--are the magnolia and the blackburnian. The first fairly dazzles us with its bluish crown, white and black face, black and olive-green back, white marked wings and tail, yellow throat and rump, and strongly streaked breast. The blackburnian is an exquisite little fellow, marked with white and black, but with the crown, several patches on the face, the throat and breast of a rich warm orange that glows amid the green foliage like a living coal of fire. The black poll warbler is an easy bird to identify; but do not expect to recognise it when it returns from the North in the fall. Its black crown has disappeared, and in general it looks like a different bird. At the present time when the dogwood blossoms are in their full perfection, and the branches and twigs of the trees are not yet hidden, but their outlines only softened by the light, feathery foliage, the tanagers and orioles have their day. Nesting cares have not yet made them fearful of showing their bright plumage, and scores of the scarlet and orange forms play among the branches. The flycatchers and vireos now appear in force--little hunters of insects clad in leafy greens and browns, with now and then a touch of brightness--as in the yellow-throated vireo or in the crest of the kingbird. The lesser sandpipers, both the spotted and the solitary, teeter along the brooks and ponds, and probe the shallows for tiny worms. Near the woody streams the so-called water thrushes spring up before us. Strange birds these, in appearance like thrushes, in their haunts and in their teetering motion like sandpipers, but in reality belonging to the same family as the tree-loving wood warblers. A problem not yet solved by ornithologists is: what was the mode of life of the ancestor of the many warblers? Did he cling to and creep along the bark, as the black-and-white warbler, or feed from the ground or the thicket as does the worm-eating? Did he snatch flies on the wing as the necklaced Canadian warbler, or glean from the brook's edge as our water thrush? The struggle for existence has not been absent from the lives of these light-hearted little fellows, and they have had to be jack-of-all-trades in their search for food.