Obituary. 295 



Frauz Joseph Laud, Bendire was boru iu Hesse Darmstadt 

 in 1836, went to America in 1852, and entered the United 

 States Army in 1854 ; after which, till his retirement in 1886, 

 he was almost continuously on frontier service at remote or 

 inaccessible outposts. Apart from the reputation he acquired 

 in Indian warfare, he was a well-known explorer, laid out 

 many roads and surveyed routes for telegraph-lines, while 

 as a naturalist no American of this half century has spent 

 half so much time in the field or made such voluminous and 

 accurate notes. 



Bendire contributed several letters to the ' Bulletin of the 

 Nuttall Ornithological Club,^ and in 1877 he published an 

 important paper on the Birds of South-eastern Oregon ; but 

 his great work is undoubtedly the ' Life- Histories of North- 

 American Birds,' the second volume of which we have noticed 

 on p. 268 of this part. He was an extremely popular man, 

 and his death is deeply regretted ; by no one more than by 

 Dr. C. Hart Merriam, from whose obituary notice in 'Science' 

 we have taken much of the foregoing. But as showing the 

 character of the man, and the kind of experiences he met 

 with when collecting, we cannot do better than give an 

 extract from vol. i. of the above work (pp. 231-232), in 

 which Bendire describes the finding of the first nest then 

 known of Buteo abbreviatus, the Zone-tailed Hawk. On 

 April 22nd, 1872, he had found one egg in the nest, and, as 

 he naturally wished to obtain another, he paid a second 

 visit to the locality on May 3rd : — 



'' As the bird appeared so very tame, I concluded to 

 examine the nest before attempting to secure the parent, 

 and it was well I did so. Climbing to the nest I found 

 another egg, and at the same instant saw from my elevated 

 position something else which could not have been observed 

 from the ground, namely, several Apache Indians crouched 

 down on the side of a little canon which opened into the 

 creek-bed about 80 yards further up. They were evidently 

 watching me, their heads being raised just to a level with 

 the top of the canon. In those days Apache Indians were 

 not the most desirable neighbours, especially when one was 



