Page:The Singing Tree - William Henry Mousley - The Auk 36(3) - P0339-p0348.pdf/2

340 idea first occurred to me of paying special attention to them, and ceasing to worry about the females, which as I have already remarked one rarely sees, as compared with the other sex.

With this object in view, I repaired one day to a favorite wood, on the outskirts of which I located a male Myrtle Warbler (Dendroica coronata) singing from the top of an ash tree. This bird I deternined to keep in view, and follow about wherever he went, a thing much easier to carry out in theory than in practice as a rule, although this particular bird was more than kind, and gave me very little trouble. After watching and following him about for some time, I found that he generally ended by coming back to the ash tree, from which he always sang. Seeing that this was the case I gave up following him about, and remained in the immediate neighborhood of this tree, where soon afterwards I had the satisfaction of seeing him make a sudden dart from the top of it into a nearby spruce, and there I found the female and her nest, and at the same time learnt the secret which has since enabled me to add many a rare warbler to my breeding list. Do not imagine however, kind reader, that in that one morning I had found the perfect system by which all gamblers hope some day or other to 'break the bank.' More often than not the bank breaks the gamblers, and no system seems to hold good for long. With mine, however, the case has been different, for the longer I have studied the ways of the male birds at nesting time, the more I have been able to perfect my system, and instead of the birds beating me, I am gradually getting the better of them, although to do so I have had to display more than the patience of Job, and have often had to remain with them for hours at a time before obtaining their secret. For the perfect working of my system, however, there is one thing essential and that is a singing male, the lack of which lost me a great prize only this summer (1918), for having located a pair of Cape May Warblers (Dendroira tigrina) in a certain large wood from June 11 to 26, I failed to find the nesting site, as the male could never be found singing, I would come across him (only once with the female) often in a certain area of the wood, but he always managed to give me the slip after a time, and his failure to sing never enabled me to follow him up. Not so however with a male Bay-breasted Warbler (Dendrożca castanea) that I came across about the same