428 LAND BIRDS 
were frequently seen in motion and at rest. A unique 
courtship that I saw was even more ardent than that of 
the Anna hummer. Like a brilliantly polished bronze 
pendulum, the gallant little lover swung in an are of two 
yards’ extent back and forth for fully three minutes be- 
fore his coquettish sweetheart. Before he had ceased 
she darted out from her perch, and bill to bill they 
whirled far up in the air until they looked like big 
beetles. I think the flight must have taken them sixty 
feet straight up. Then back they came and alighted two 
feet apart on the same slender dead twigs. Four days 
after this, the nest was discovered on the branch of a 
low shrub in a very marshy place. It contained one egg 
June 11, and the little bronze mother had begun to brood. 
Her favorite feeding ground was twenty feet out on the 
marsh, where it was too wet for me to follow, but she 
seemed to be licking insects from a small whitish flower 
among the reeds. Both sexes were astonishingly fear- 
less, following a little, four-year-old Indian girl back and 
forth, and evidently taking her red-gowned figure for an 
animated blossom. 
Although so tiny, the male courageously attacked and 
drove away a Brewer blackbird that had chanced to 
alight in the bush containing the wee nest. This black- 
bird was nesting in a hollow post which stood in four 
feet of water fifty feet from the bush. His usual course 
in leaving his nest was over the hummer’s bush, and the 
male seldom failed to dart out at him from his watch 
tower near by ; but whether from natural pugnacity or 
from a genuine regard for the safety of his own treasures, 
