98 A-BIRDING ON A BRONCO. 



as if cooling themselves, and the unbird-like atti- 

 tude together with the horrid appearance of their 

 red skinny heads made them seem more like har- 

 pies than before. 



They were most interesting at a distance. I 

 once saw three of them standing like black im- 

 ages on a granite bowlder, on top of a hill over- 

 looking the valley. After a moment they set out 

 and went circling in the sky. Although they 

 flew in a group, it seemed as if the individual 

 birds respected one another's lines so as not to 

 cover the same ground. Sometimes when soaring 

 they seemed to rest on the air and let themselves 

 be borne by the wind ; for they wobbled from 

 one side to the other like a cork on rough water. 



One of the most interesting birds of the valley 

 is the road-runner or chaparral cock, a grayish 

 brown bird who stands almost as high as a crow 

 and has a tail as long as a magpie's. He is noted 

 for his swiftness of foot. Sometimes, when we 

 were driving over the hills, a road-runner would 

 start out of the brush on a lonely part of the 

 road and for quite a distance keep ahead of the 

 horses, although they trotted freely along. When 

 tired of running he would dash off into the brush, 

 where he stopped himself by suddenly throwing 

 his long tail over his back. A Texan, in talking 

 of the bird, said, "It takes a right peart cur to 

 catch one," and added that when a road-runner is 

 chased he will rise but once, for his main reliance 



