(_Dendroica discolor_) Wood Warbler family
_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
_zees_ 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.