THE CALIFORNIA ROAD-RUNNER 13 



of this curious dweller of the deserts, and I was 

 filled with emotion when a few days later I was 

 led to the nest and found the mother sitting on 

 a pile of sticks, the ill-made home placed some 

 seven feet above ground in a juniper shrub. 

 With her mottled and speckled plumage she was 

 so very inconspicuous that I am sure I should 

 never have seen her had she not jumped off the 

 nest as I approached within a few feet of it. 



What interested me as the days went by was 

 not so much the rude home, lined with almost 

 everything from a snake skin to bits of manure, 

 or the yellowish egg within it, but the patient 

 mother, who sat almost seven weeks on the 

 nest, first with the eggs and then with the 

 young. The period of incubation was not 

 unusually long nor were the birdlings slow of 

 growth that the mother bird had to stay on the 

 nest so long. It was her strange method of 

 hatching her eggs. As though she dreaded the 

 ordeals incident to caring for a whole brood of 

 awkward, gawky, gluttonous, clamoring young- 

 sters of the same age at once, the eggs were laid 

 at considerable intervals and the incubation 

 began as soon as the first was laid. Thus the 



