TOWNSEND'S SOLITAIRE 319 



ridge. The cavity had a little dry moss in the back part of it and a 

 spray of grass at the entrance. A few hemlocks stood above and be- 

 low the site on the slope, but none was nearer than fifty meters. The 

 nest, composed of sticks and twigs, was lined with needles from silver 

 pine." 



Mrs. Bailey (1928) says of a nest in New Mexico: "When climbing 

 Pecos Baldy, on a flat-topped grassy ridge at 12,000 feet, where Pipits 

 were nesting, and Horned Larks flying around with grown young, we 

 flushed one of the Solitaires from an old charred log and to our sur- 

 prise discovered its nest fitted into a burned hollow underneath, rest- 

 ing on the ground roofed over by the log. In this case the nest was 

 made from material close at hand — grass and weed stems." 



A most unusual nesting site is illustrated by C. Andresen (1942), 

 who published a photograph of "a solitaire's nest built in an open cup- 

 board of a table in a camp ground at Lake Almanor, Plumas County, 

 California. On June 12, 1942, the nest had 3 eggs and one of the birds 

 was incubating." 



A very good description of a nest of Townsend's solitaire is published 

 by A. W. Anthony (1903), furnished by J. W. Preston, to whom the 

 nest was sent: 



At the base of the nest is a quantity of disintegrated trash such as bits of bark, 

 pieces of weed stalks and finely broken old grass stems and blades, with some dirt 

 and dust which had evidently been scratched up from the bottom of the cavity. 

 On this slight platform are dead sticks and twigs, from larch and pine, intermixed 

 with much old faded grass, pine needles and leaves of fir, and with some bulbs and 

 rootlets of different grass-like sedges. The materials have been drawn into the 

 burrowed-out cavity in the bank, leaving two-thirds of the material outward from 

 the true nest, which is of fine dry grass stems and blades finely shredded and formed 

 into a neat, well-rounded rather shallow cup. I note a few sprays of the long, 

 black moss so common among the fir trees of the mountains. The structure be- 

 fore me is oblong in outline, being ten inches long by five wide, and three and one- 

 half inches deep. In the inner end is formed the neat, symmetrical nest, cunningly 

 resting in so great an amount of superfluous matter. The inside measurements 

 are one and one-half inches deep by two and nine-tenths across. The structure is 

 of course, somewhat compressed in boxing. 



Grinnell and Storer (1924) describe a typical nest, as follows: 

 "It was in a cut bank, three feet above the road and two feet below 

 the top of the bank, in a depression in the earth between rocks and 

 at the base of a young fir tree the outstretching roots of which par- 

 tially concealed the nest. As is usual with the solitaire, a straggling 

 'tail' or apron of material extended down the bank a foot or so from 

 the nest proper. The constituent materials of the latter were slender 

 dead fir twigs and old, brown needles of sugar and Jeffrey pines. In- 

 side, the nest was about 3 inches (80 mm.) across and 2 inches (50 

 mm.) deep." 



The nests are not all as large as the one so fully described above; 



