Nova Scotia: 13 records, June 7 to 28; 9 records, June 13 to 20 (Harris).
DENDROICA VIRENS WAYNEI (Bangs)
WAYNE’S BLACK-THROATED GREEN WARBLER
Contributed by Alexander Sprunt, Jr.
HABITS
It was a silent world, this great cypress swamp where I sought the nest of the Wayne’s black-throated green warbler in the company of the man whose name it bears and who first made it known to science. A vast flooded expanse of trees and water—colorful, eerie, and mysterious—it was a realm of gray-green gloom. Huge trunks towered on all sides; long aisles of wine-dark mirror-smooth water stretched illimitably away among the buttressed columns. The grayness that predominated, from the furrowed knees and smoother trunks of the great trees to the shrouds of moss festooned from their branches, was relieved here and there by contrasting splotches of bright green overhead where occasional shafts of brilliant sunlight penetrated the canopy of feathery foliage.
Our dugout made no sound as it slid along. Only the slight splash of the paddle entering and leaving the water gave evidence of any means of propulsion. Now and again the silence was broken by the calls echoing down the flooded aisles—the clear whistle of the prothonotary warbler ringing sweetly, the full-voiced carol of the yellow-throated warbler, the strident call of the pileated woodpecker answered by the distant cry of a hunting red-shouldered hawk. Occasionally the deep, resonant “whoo-aw” of a barred owl reverberated solemnly among the cypresses, and once a sombre anhinga flapped ahead of the dugout to plunge cleanly into the still water in full career.
But above these evidences of swamp life, above the swish of breaking bass, the crashing splash of a disturbed alligator, the clamor of a startled heron or ibis, sounded one persistent call from the high branches—a song of seven notes, five on the same tone, one ascending, the last descending. It was this call that drew us on, the song of the bird whose nest we sought that morning, Wayne’s warbler, the southern race of the black-throated green warbler.
To find the black-throated green warbler in a cypress swamp might seem strange indeed to one who knows the species in its spruce and balsam highlands, in the rhododendron and laurel thickets of the Blue Ridge, in the evergreens of the Adirondacks and Maine! Yet here it is, one of the characteristic avian dwellers of the warm swamplands of the South Carolina Low Country, arriving in the spring to nest amid the green cypress twigs, the drooping limbs of the magnolias, and the majestic spread of the live oak.