oo a THE PACIFIC HORNED LARK. 
Once the attention of the odlogist was directed to this structure, it rose 
from the plain like a pyramid of Cheops before his strained anxieties. It was 
torture to have to leave it for half an hour. How could that school-boy pass 
at twenty yards and not see it! Then, when I returned to reconnoiter, the 
dear cattle were just being turned loose for the morning, and they, forsooth, 
must straggle past it. At the end of another hour, unable longer to endure 
the suspense, I returned to perform the last offices. The band of sheep was 
out then, and they were drifting so perilously close, that I ran the last hundred 
yards to head them off, and none too soon. «Yet that precious monument of 
simplicity held three eggs, unharmed until the advent of the man, who 
wrought the ruin surely, in the name of—Science(?). Consistency, thou 
art a jewel found in no egg-collector’s cabinet! 
The nest of the Pacific Horned Lark is not often concealed, but usually 
it does not more than fill the hollow of some cavity, natural or artificial,—a 
wheel-rut, a footprint of horse or cow, a cavity left by an upturned stone, or, 
as in one instance, the bottom of an unused 
golf-hole. The only attempt at conceal- 
ment noted was where the nest had been 
placed under the fold of a large 
strip of tar paper, most of which 
had become tightly plastered 
to the ground. 
In spite of the compara- 
tively mild weather prevail- 
ing in April, eggs are not 
often laid before the second 
week in May, and a second 
set is deposited about the 
second week in June. The 
number of eggs in a set 
varies from two to four, 
three being most commonly 
found. In color the ground 
is grayish white, while dots 
of greenish gray or reddish 
gray are now gathered in a heavy wreath about the larger end, and now regu- 
larly distributed over the entire surface—sometimes so heavily as to obscure 
the ground. The eggs are often very perceptibly glossed and there is fre- 
quently a haunting greenish or yellowish tinge which diffuses itself over the 
whole—an atmosphere, as the artist would say. Variation in size runs from 
ovate to elongate oval, and measurements range from .93 x .60 to .81 x .58. 
Horned Larks owe their preservation chiefly to the wariness of the female, 
Taken near Tacoma, Photo by J. H. Bowles. 
NEST AND EGGS OF PACIFIC HORNED LARK. 
