290 The Lesser Birds of the Sierra 
length discovered the nest placed in a small hole in the face of a 
cliff. Most unluckily the female was shot before she laid and thus 
I lost the one good chance of my lifetime. The following year 
I was entirely unsuccessful in finding these birds in situations 
where I could watch their movements. In 1877 I noticed a pair 
frequenting the same ravine where I had found the nest in 1875. 
In the interval a big powder-magazine had been built close to the 
cliff where the old nest was and the inevitable sentry had of course 
been posted on the magazine, which, by the way, I rather think 
was empty at this time. For several days I watched these wily 
birds without any result but I learnt from a Rifleman on sentry 
that, when I had gone away, the birds came down and played 
about the magazine and cliffs adjacent to it, taking small notice of 
him. The solution was obvious. I would take the sentry’s place. 
So inducing him to extend his beat to the furthest legal limit I 
slipped into his sentry box and with my eye at the peep-hole in 
the side waited and watched. In a very few minutes a Black 
Wheatear appeared on the cliff not 50 yards off and, after watching 
the sentry turn his back, flew straight towards me and entered 
one of the red-tiled ventilators of the magazine! Procuring a 
ladder I went up it and found the nest placed a couple of feet 
inside the shaft. Alas! it contained four young birds just 
hatched out ! 
On 1 May of the same year, as I entered a cavern near the 
summit of a small cliff I was climbing, a Black Wheatear flew off 
its nest which was placed in one of the sandstone “pockets” in 
the roof. This was the first nest I was able to examine properly 
and was naturally immensely struck at seeing that the lower portion 
of the nest was composed of stones of various sizes, some as large 
as walnuts. At the time I had never heard of this singular custom 
of the Black Wheatear which has earned for it the title of Pedvero 
2.e., the stone-quarrier, among the folk of the sierra. The nest 
