OLIVE SPARROW 545 



heard its pretty little song later on, I found it both pleasing and 

 distinctive." 



George M. Sutton (1951) thus describes his first encounter with 

 the species in Nuevo Le6n, Mexico : 



But what were these mousey, olive-backed finches which moved like shadows 

 from bush to bush; which so reminded us of undersized Green-tailed Towhees; 

 and which had that species' amusing habit of kicking up the dead leaves while 

 searching for food? If we walked toward them, even though slowly and noise- 

 lessly, they kept well ahead of us. But if we sat down and remained quite still, 

 they resumed their feeding, chased each other playfully, and gave their faint 

 chirps of alarm and beady squeals of contentment almost under our noses. Their 

 eyes were light brown. Frequently as many as three or four of them fed close by, 

 scratching diligently a moment or two, then racing across an open stretch to the 

 shelter of the next thicket. They were birds we had never seen before — Olive 

 Sparrows * * *. The neat brown and gray striping of the head, gray of the 

 breast, and touch of yellow at the bend of the wing made the Olive Sparrow a 

 very attractive bird, we thought, and its manners were winsome. We judged 

 it to be a common nesting species in the vicinity of Monterrey though we heard 

 no songs and witnessed neither courtship nor pairing. 



Nesting. — S. N. Rhoads (1892) "found the Texas Sparrow thor- 

 oughly at home in the Corpus Christi and San Patricio chaparral, and 

 secured their nests and fully fledged young." Dr. James C. Merrill 

 (1879) says: "I have found the nests with eggs at intervals from 

 May 9 to September 7. These are placed in low bushes, rarely more 

 than three feet from the ground; the nests are rather large, composed 

 of twigs and straws, and lined with finer straws and hairs; they are 

 practically domed, the nests being placed rather obliquely, and the 

 part above the entrance being somewhat built out." 



George B. Sennett (1878) claims "* * * they raise at least two 

 broods within our limits, one in May and June, the other in August 

 and September," and adds (1879) : 



The domed nests are situated in the heart of bushes, generally from two to 

 five feet above the ground. They were found in all sorts of open thickets. One 

 I detected close by the roadside, in a clump of bushes, under a small tree; another 

 on a dry knoll, which was covered with cacti, thorny bushes of various kinds, 

 and scattering trees of mesquite and ebony, and in close proximity to nests of the 

 Long-billed Thrasher and the Yellow-billed Cuckoo. Most frequently, however, 

 nests were found in those depressions near woods, where water stands during the 

 wet season, which, when dry, abound with grass hummocks and bunches of rank 

 weeds covered with wild-tomato vines. The nests are nearly round in shape, 

 large for the size of the bird, and constructed of dried weed-stems, pieces of bark, 

 grasses, and leaves — sometimes with a little hair for lining of the bottom, but more 

 frequently without. 



Herbert Friedmann (1925) found five nests near Brownsville, "all 

 in prickly pear cacti." Dean Amadon and Don R. Eckleberry 

 (1955) found a nest about 3 feet above the ground in the center of a 

 large mass of candelabra cactus. 



