428 BULLETIN 191, UNITED STATES NATIONAL MUSEUM 



the hard stony soil supported a scanty growth of low mesquites, hack- 

 berries, hawthorns, catclaws, and other little thorny shrubs, with a few 

 scattering chollas. Here it was living in company with cactus wrens, 

 crissal thrashers, and Palmer's thrashers. Elsewhere in that region we 

 found it on the mesquite plains, on the greasewood and cholla flats, and 

 on the low hillsides dotted with picturesque giant cactus. It and the 

 other desert birds seem to make a living in the harsh and cruel desert, 

 far from any water, where the soil is baked hard and dry and every 

 living plant is armed with forbidding thorns; even the "horned toad," 

 which is really a lizard, carries a crown of thorns on its head and lesser 

 spikes on its body, to protect it. But the verdin is equal to the occasion 

 and builds its own annored castles, protected by a mass of thorny twigs, 

 in which to rear its young, and to which it can retire at night. 



Dr. Joseph Grinnell (1914) says of the haunts of the verdin in the 

 lower valley of the Colorado River: "The only essential condition for 

 the presence of this species appeared to be stiff-twigged thorny bushes 

 or trees of some sort. This requisite was met with in a variety of situa- 

 tions, as in the screwbeans of the first bottom, mesquites of the second 

 bottom, and catclaw, ironwood, palo verde and daleas of the desert 

 washes. * * * While the birds were often seen in willows, arrowweed, 

 and even low shrubs of Atriplex and sandburr, these were always within 

 a limited radius of nests. As far as observation went, these birds do not 

 need to visit water; some were met with as much as three miles away 

 from the river up desert washes." 



Near Brownsville, Tex., we found the verdin only in the high, dry, 

 thorny chaparral, and not in the dense and heavy timber along the 

 resacas. George Finlay Simmons (1925) says that, in the Austin 

 region, "bushy mesquite valleys" are preferred to open deserts. 



Nesting. — The remarkable nests of the verdin are much in evidence 

 throughout its habitat, especially large for so tiny a liird, wonderfully 

 well made, and surprisingly conspicuous, for they are usually placed at 

 or near the end of a low limb, without a shred of leafage to hide them. 

 The number of nests that one sees would seem to indicate that the bird 

 is more aljundant than it really is. But it is well known that the verdin 

 builds roosting nests, or winter nests, as well as breeding nests. They 

 are most industrious little nest builders. Furthermore, the nests are 

 so firmly made that old nests probably persist for more than one year, 

 perhaps several years. Most of the nests that we saw in Arizona were 

 in mesquites, hackberries, or catclaws, but others have found them in 

 palo verdes, stunted live oaks, Zizyphus bushes, chollas, and a variety 

 of other thorny trees and shrubs. 



Of the numerous descriptions of the marvelous nest of the verdin 



