Pennsylvania: 5 records, May 16 to 26.
BLACKBURNIAN WARBLER
Plates 40, 41
HABITS
Bagg and Eliot (1937) give the following account of the history of the naming of the Blackburnian Warbler:
Some time in the later eighteenth century, a specimen (apparently female) was sent from New York to England, and there described and named for a Mrs. Blackburn who collected stuffed birds and was a patron to ornithology. Blackburniae—Gmelin’s latinization, in 1788, of this English name—was its scientific designation until quite recently, when in an obscure German publication, dated 1776, were discovered a description of a specimen from French Guiana (which is well east of the species’ normal winter range), and the name fusca, blackish. Wilson recognized the male as a rare transient near Philadelphia, but when he shot a female (apparently, though he called it a male) in the Great Pine Swamp, Pa., he named it Sylvia parus, the Hemlock Warbler. Audubon, too, considered the Blackburnian and Hemlock Warblers distinct.
Blackburnian seems to be a doubly appropriate name, for its upper parts are largely black and its throat burns like a brilliant orange flame amid the dark foliage of the hemlocks and spruces. A glimpse of such a brilliant gem, flashing out from its sombre surroundings, is fairly startling.