FIELD-DAYS IN CALIFORNIA 



taire, a most distinguished, aristocratic-seeming 

 bird, always good to look at (this was only my 

 second one), and a fretful canon wren, the day 

 would have been ornithologically a waste. 



A second visit to the same canon was equally 

 unproductive, except that I took great interest 

 in hearing for the first time the song of the West- 

 ern robin. A large flock of the birds, a hundred 

 or more, sat in a group of tall sycamores in the 

 arroyo (the dry, rocky, gravelly, flood-wrought 

 river-bed which leads into — or out of — every 

 such ravine in this summer-dry Southwestern 

 country), and one or two among them were in 

 free voice. Their calls I had previously found to 

 be indistinguishable from those of their Eastern 

 relative. Now I learned, what I had found no 

 book to tell me, that the same is true of the song 

 itself. If I had heard it in Massachusetts, I should 

 have remarked nothing peculiar about it. 



The next morning, having been at all pains to 

 obtain particular instructions, I set out for the 

 third canon, a last resort, a case of now or never, 

 so far as the neighborhood of Pasadena was con- 

 cerned. By a stroke of good fortune, when I had 

 left the street-car and trudged across lots to the 

 <* avenue" that I had been instructed to follow, 

 • — an avenue running between orange groves and 

 vineyards, and shaded by pepper-trees, — I was 



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