Length -- 4.75 to 5 inches. About an inch and a half shorter than
the English sparrow.
Male -- Olive-green above, shading to yellowish on the head, and
with brick-red spots on back between the shoulders. A yellow
line over the eye; wing-bars and all under parts bright yellow,
heavily streaked with black on the sides. Line through the eye
and crescent below it, black. Much white in outer tail
feathers.
Female -- Paler; upper parts more grayish olive, and markings
Less distinct than male's.
Range -- Eastern half of the United States. Nests as far north as
New England and Michigan. Winters from Florida southward.
Migrations -- May. September. Summer resident.
Doubtless this diminutive bird was given its name because it prefers open
country rather than the woods -- the scrubby undergrowth of oaks, young
evergreens, and bushes that border clearings being as good a place as any to
look for it, and not the wind-swept, treeless tracts of the wild West. Its
range is southerly. The Southern and Middle States are where it is most
abundant. Here is a wood warbler that is not a bird of the woods -- less so,
in fact, than either the summer yellowbird (yellow warbler) or the palm
warbler, that are eminently neighborly and fond of pasture lands and roadside
thickets. But the prairie warblers are rather more retiring little sprites
than their cousins, and it is not often we get a close enough view of them to
note the brick-red spots on their backs, which are their distinguishing marks.
They have a most unkind preference for briery bushes, that discourage human
intimacy. In such forbidding retreats they build their nest of plant-fibre,
rootlets, and twigs, lined with plant-down and hair.
The song of an individual prairie warbler makes only a slight impression. It
consists "of a series of six or seven quickly repeated tees, the next to the
last one being the highest" (Chapman). But the united voices of a dozen or
more of these pretty little birds, that often sing together, afford something
approaching a musical treat.