. The American natural history : a foundation of useful knowledge of the higher animals of North America . Natural history. THE WARBLERS 189 It is not at all essential that such tiny, incon- spicuous creatures as warblers should be recog- nized and correctly named at sight. Already a million warblers have died to make holi- days for collectors. Not long since I received from an egg-dealer a circular advertising the following eggs for sale: Worm-Eating 84sets, 416 eggs. Yellow Warbler 94 " 388 " Oven-Bird ; " 458 " Yellow-Breasted Chat 139 " 521 "
. The American natural history : a foundation of useful knowledge of the higher animals of North America . Natural history. THE WARBLERS 189 It is not at all essential that such tiny, incon- spicuous creatures as warblers should be recog- nized and correctly named at sight. Already a million warblers have died to make holi- days for collectors. Not long since I received from an egg-dealer a circular advertising the following eggs for sale: Worm-Eating 84sets, 416 eggs. Yellow Warbler 94 " 388 " Oven-Bird ; " 458 " Yellow-Breasted Chat 139 " 521 " Kentucky Warbler 210 " 917 " Total for 51 species. 1,274 sets, 5,433 eggs. It is such wanton destruction as this which makes me "down" on egg-collecting. It is safe to say that the taking of those 5,433 warbler eggs, robbed the farms and forests of New York state of that number of useful birds, not count- ing possible progeny, and did not one dollar's worth of good to the "cause of science," or any other public interest. Already, poor "Science" has an awful load of crimes against Nature to answer for. Do not add to it without very strong justification. The members of the Warbler Family, commonly called wood warblers, are distributed all over North America, wherever insects abound, from the southern edge of the arctic Barren Grounds to southern Mexico. In her very scholarly and useful book entitled " Birds of the Western United States," Mrs. Florence Merriam Bailey enumer- ates forty species; and Mr. Frank M. Chapman, in his "Birds of Eastern North America," gives fifty-two. Of these, however, twenty-one are duplicated, and therefore the whole number of warblers described in the two handbooks is seventy-one. When we consider the fact that about sixty of those species are very small birds, of uniform size, and many of them quite un- marked by striking special colors, the diffi- culty of becoming acquainted with the dif
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