National Geographic Magazine/Volume 31/Number 4/Friends of Our Forests/Oven-bird

Oven-bird (Seiurus aurocapillus)


Length, a little over 6 inches. Above mostly olive green; below white, breast and sides streaked with black.

Range: Breeds from southern Mackenzie, Ontario, southern Labrador, and Newfoundland south to Wyoming, Kansas, southern Missouri, Ohio Valley, and Virginia; also in mountains of Georgia and South Carolina; winters in southern Florida, southern Louisiana, Bahamas, West Indies, and southern Mexico to Colombia.

The oven-bird is one of our best-known birds and one the woodland stroller is sure to get acquainted with, whether he will or no, so common is it and so generally distributed. In moments of ecstacy it has a flight song which has been highly extolled, but this is only for the initiated; its insistent repetition of “teacher, teacher, teacher,” as Burroughs happily phrases it, is all the bird vouchsafes for the ears of ordinary mortals. Its curious domed-over grass nest is placed on the ground and is not hard to find. The food of the oven-bird does not differ greatly from that of other warblers, notwithstanding the fact that the bird is strictly terrestrial in habits. It consists almost exclusively of insects, including ants, beetles, moths, span worms, and other caterpillars, with a few spiders, millepods, and weevils.

(See Biol. Surv. Bull. 17; also yearbook for 1900, p. 416.)

Source: Henry W. Henshaw (April 1917), “Friends of Our Forests”, The National Geographic Magazine 31(4): 304. (Illustration from p. 305.)