BRIDLED TITMOUSE 425 



Water Creek and San Francisco River; but they are more character- 

 istically birds of the oak country." 



Nesting. — We did not succeed in finding a nest of the bridled tit- 

 mouse. The natural cavities in which they habitually nest are too 

 numerous to be thoroughly explored, and it is almost impossible to 

 make the sitting bird leave its nest by rapping on the tree. Once a bit 

 of white in the bottom of a deep, dark cavity, which looked like a sitting 

 bird, induc.ed us to chop it out, but there was no nest in the hole, much 

 less a bird! 



My companion, Frank Willard, sent me his notes on two nests found 

 in that locality in 1899. One, found on May 17, was in a natural cavity 

 in an oak tree well up on the side of the mountain at about 6,800 feet; 

 the entrance was through a small knot hole in live wood, 12 feet from 

 the ground ; the nest was made of grass and lichens. The other, found 

 on May 20, was in a natural cavity, 15 feet up, in a dead oak by the 

 roadside, well down the canyon, between 5,000 and 5,500 feet elevation. 



W. E. D. Scott (1886) was, I believe, the first to publish an account 

 of the nesting of this species, of which he writes : "On the two occasions 

 that I have discovered the species breeding the nests were located in 

 natural cavities in the live-oaks, close to my house. The first of these 

 was found on May 9, 1884. I took the female as she was leaving the 

 nest, which was in a cavity, formed by decay, in an oak stump. The 

 opening of this hole was about three and a half feet from the ground ; 

 its diameter was about three inches inside, and it was some eighteen 

 inches deep. The entrance was a small knot-hole where a branch had 

 been broken off, and was only large enough to admit the parent birds. 

 The hollow was lined with cottonwood down, the fronds of some small 

 rock-ferns, and some bits of cotton-waste." 



Of the other nest, found May 8, 1885, he says: "The small entrance 

 was some six feet from the ground, and the cavity was a foot deep, and 

 two and a half inches in diameter. It was lined on the bottom and well 

 up on the sides with a mat composed of cottonwood down, shreds of 

 decayed grasses, some hair from a rabbit, and many fragments of 

 cotton-waste, gathered by the birds from refuse waste that had been 

 used to clean the machinery of a mill hard by." 



There are four nests in the Thayer collection, all taken in southern 

 Arizona and all in natural cavities in oaks, at various heights from 4 to 

 28 feet above ground; all these nssts are lined, more or less profusely, 

 with soft, cottony substances that may have been the downy coverings 

 of leaf buds, blossoms, or catkins, or possibly the cocoons of insects 

 or spiders ; one nest was made almost entirely of this material ; the 

 foundations of these nests consist of strips of coarse weed stems, fine 



