PLAINS AND FOOTHILLS 185 



that is, the base of the mesa was below the village, 

 while its top towered far above it. A mesa was a 

 structural portion of Colorado topography that neither 

 of the two ramblers had yet explored, and we were 

 anxious to know something about its resources from a 

 natural history point of view. It was hard climbing on 

 account of the steepness of the acclivity, its rocky char- 

 acter, and the thick network of bushes and brambles in 

 many places ; but " excelsior " was our motto in all our 

 mountaineering, and we allowed no surmountable diffi- 

 culties to daunt us. What birds select such steep 

 places for a habitat ? Here lived in happy domesticity 

 the lyrical green-tailed towhee, the bird of the liquid 

 voice, the poet laureate of the steep, bushy mountain 

 sides, just as the water-ousel is the poet of the cascades 

 far down in the canons and gulches ; here also thrived 

 the spurred towhees, one of which had tucked a nest 

 beneath a bush cradling three speckled eggs. This was 

 the second nest of this species I had found, albeit not 

 the last. Here also dwelt the rock wren, a little bird 

 that was new to me and that I had not found in the 

 latitude of Colorado Springs either east or west of the 

 continental divide. A description of this anchorite of 

 the rocks will be given in a later chapter. I simply 

 pause here to remark that he has a sort of " monarch- 

 of-all-I-survey " air as he sits on a tall sandstone rock 

 and blows the music from his Huon\s horn on the mes- 



