ie THE LAZULI BUNTING. 
for separate spheres: she to skulk and hide and escape the hostile eye in the 
discharge of her maternal duties; he to lose himself against the blue of 
heaven, as he sings reassuringly from a tree-top, or sends down notes of 
warning upon the approach of danger. 
The song of the Lazuli Bunting is a rambling warble, not unlike that of 
the Indigo Bunting (C. cyanea), but somewhat less energetic. Its brief 
4 course rises and falls in short 
Mm” cadences and ends with a_ hasty 
jumble of unfinished notes, as tho 
the singer were out of breath. 
Moreover, the bird does not take 
his task very seriously, and he does 
not burden the mid-day air with 
incessant song, as does his tireless 
cousin. 
Somewhere in the shrubbery and 
tangle, whether of saplings, berry- 
bushes, roses, ferns, or weeds, a 
rather bulky nest is built about an 
upright fork, at a height of two 
or three feet from the ground. A 
nest observed in Yakima County 
was begun on the 19th of June and 
practically completed by the after- 
noon of the following day,—this 
altho the first egg was not laid 
until the 26th. “Hemp,” milkweed 
fibers, and dried grasses were used 
in construction, and there was an 
elaborate lining of horse-hair (poor 
dears; what will they do when the 
automobile has fully supplanted the 
horse?). 
Amena means pleasant, but the 
female amenity is anything else, 
when her fancied rights of maternity are assailed. Her vocabulary is 
limited, to be sure, to a single note, but her repeated chip is expressive of 
all words in dis from distrust to distress and violent disapprobation. 
Taken near Spokane. Photo by Fred S. Merrill. 
A LAZULI BUNTING’S NEST. 
