(_Compsothlypis americana_) Wood Warbler family
_Called also_: BLUE YELLOW-BACKED WARBLER
_Length_--4.5 to 4.75 inches. About an inch and a half shorter
than the English sparrow.
_Male and Female_--Slate-colored above, with a greenish-yellow
or bronze patch in the middle of the back. Chin, throat, and
breast yellow. A black, bluish, or rufous band across the
breast, usually lacking in female. Underneath white, sometimes
marked with rufous on sides, but these markings are variable.
Wings have two white patches; outer tail feathers have white
patch near the end.
_Range_--Eastern North America. Winters from Florida southward.
_Migrations_--April. October. Summer resident.
Through an open window of an apartment in the very heart of New York
City, a parula warbler flew this spring of 1897, surely the daintiest,
most exquisitely beautiful bird visitor that ever voluntarily lodged
between two brick walls.
A number of such airy, tiny beauties flitting about among the blossoms
of the shrubbery on a bright May morning and swaying on the slenderest
branches with their inimitable grace, is a sight that the memory
should retain into old age. They seem the very embodiment of life,
joy, beauty, grace; of everything lovely that birds by any possibility
could be. Apparently they are wafted about the garden; they fly with
no more effort than a dainty lifting of the wings, as if to catch the
breeze, that seems to lift them as it might a bunch of thistledown.
They go through a great variety of charming posturings as they hunt
for their food upon the blossoms and tender fresh twigs, now creeping
like a nuthatch along the bark and peering into the crevices, now
gracefully swaying and balancing like a goldfinch upon a slender,
pendent stem. One little sprite pauses in its hunt for the insects to
raise its pretty head and trill a short and wiry song.
But the parula warbler does not remain long about the gardens and
orchards, though it will not forsake us altogether for the Canadian
forests, where most of its relatives pass the summer. It retreats only
to the woods near the water, if may be, or to just as close a
counterpart of a swampy southern woods, where the Spanish or Usnea
"moss" drapes itself over the cypresses, as it can find here at the
north. Its rarely beautiful nest, that hangs suspended from a slender
branch very much like the Baltimore oriole's, is so woven and
festooned with this moss that its concealment is perfect.
[Illustration: CHESTNUT-SIDED WARBLER]
[Illustration: BLUEBIRD]