One seen in the White Mountains was built on a
mossy, rocky edge, directly on the ground at the foot of a pine tree, and made
of rootlets, moss, needles from the trees overhead, and several layers of
leaves outside, with a lining of fine grasses that cradled four white,
speckled eggs.
Audubon likened the bird's feeble note to the breaking of twigs.
PINE WARBLER (Dendroica vigorsii) Wood Warbler family
Called also: PINE-CREEPING WARBLER
Length -- 5.5 to 6 inches. A trifle smaller than the English
sparrow.
Male -- Yellowish olive above; clear yellow below, shading to
grayish white, with obscure dark streaks on side of breast. Two
whitish wing-bars; two outer tail feathers partly white.
Female -- Duller; grayish white only faintly tinged with yellow
underneath.
Range -- North America, east of the Rockies; north to Manitoba,
And south to Florida and the Bahamas. Winters from southern
Illinois southward.
Migrations -- March or April. October or later. Common summer
resident.
The pine warbler closely presses the myrtle warbler for the first place in the
ranks of the family migrants, but as the latter bird often stays north all
winter, it is usually given the palm. Here is a warbler, let it be recorded,
that is fittingly named, for it is a denizen of pine woods only; most common
in the long stretches of pine forests at the south and in New York and New
England, and correspondingly uncommon wherever the woodsman's axe has laid the
pine trees low throughout its range.
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