514 THE FERRUGINOUS ROUGH-LEG. 
EAGLE-LIKE birds are still seen soaring about the lava ranges and the 
more desolate gorges of the foothills in eastern Washington, but the arch- 
buzzards are no longer so plentiful in the West that close and comparative 
study is easy. Our experience of this bird in the State is limited chiefly to 
the taking of a set of eggs in Chelan County (then Okanogan County) in 
the spring of 1896. 
On the 4th day of April, while proceeding along “the grade,” or granite 
cut road, north of Chelan, I glanced upward and saw a large black raptor 
eyeing me calmly from the middle of a commanding cliff, where she was 
evidently busy with domestic arrangements. The situation was so bold and 
the road so well traveled that the bird-man scarcely slept in the interval pend- 
ing examination on the 7th. The birds were again sighted on this occasion, 
and gave such clear evidence that the nest was occupied, that a return was 
made on the 1oth with an equipment of ropes, gun, etc. 
The nest was a bulky platform of sticks lodged midway on a projecting 
rock of a granite cliff, 125 feet in height. The cliff was practically perpen- 
dicular, indeed overhung slightly for the space above the nest, so that the latter 
enjoyed practical immunity from western showers. A small ledge led toward 
the nest from the side of the cliff, but fell short some twenty feet, and its 
precarious footholds required to be supplemented by ropes from the outset. 
Making fast a seventy-foot line to a pile of rocks on the brow of the cliff, I 
let the end fall where the ledge played out, and worked over to it by the aid 
of another rope suspended further along the cliff. Bare-footed and armed 
with an egg-scoop—a bag of muslin at the end of a ten-foot pole—and with 
a bowline at the waist, I clung and swung, spider-fashion, until the nest came 
into full view just below me. (The “bird-man” was a preacher-man then, 
and a little reticent as to his bird-nesting proclivities—hence the foolhardi- 
ness of a single-handed attempt.) Recollections of Sindbad and the Roe came 
to mind at this juncture, but he is thrice armed who hath his cause just. 
Science (with a large S) will bolster a weak heart, and it will conveniently 
justify that pride of conquest which makes an odlogical- collection a volume 
of personal history rather than an exact text-book in ornithology. Beside 
that the Rough-legs were arrant cowards. Scream they did like Eagles, but 
not once did they venture within gun-shot, and they sat most of the time 
moping helplessly on a pine-stub two hundred yards away. 
The nest appeared at close quarters to be an ancient affair. Indeed, its 
foundations were probably older than the county road which wound beneath it 
Its outlook included a variety of wild scenery. Black Butte cut the dead level 
of the great Columbia terrace on the north, like a shark’s fin on a summer sea. 
The mighty river itself rolled six hundred feet below, and the Douglas County 
“breaks,” with their shimmering gray-green bunch-grass levels and_ their 
frowning brown bastions of basalt, filled the eastern horizon. Small wonder 
