BIRDS OF THE CALIFORNIA DESERT 



FRED W. KOCH 



■ SHALL never forget my first night on the desert beside a smouldering 

 yucca fire, and the early morning awakening amidst these spiny desert 

 trees. All about me were the songs of the purple finch, the desert 



sparrows, and the cactus wrens. But above all, in a class by itself, 

 were the clear notes of Le Conte's thrasher, more than rival of the mock- 

 ingbird, and a thousand times more to be appreciated in the desert waste. 

 I could not find the singer, but a year later, when on a trip through the 

 heart of the Colorado Desert, I came upon a veritable colony of these sweet 

 singers, and soon spied a mother-bird trying to lure me from her nest in 

 a palo verde tree. 



Many of the desert birds are light gray in color, matching almost 

 completely the surrounding sand, and making it very difficult to distinguish 

 them. But here and there a flash of color discloses an oriole or a humming- 

 bird, whose brilliant plumage is only matched by the cactus bloom or the 

 swaying branches of the Mexican ocotea, the flaming candlebush of the 

 desert. Often these orioles of the deserts cross the mountains to the west, 

 and almost anywhere amidst the rows of fan-palms at Riverside one can 

 find the nests securely sewed to the under side of the broad fan leaves, 

 perfectly sheltered from both sun and rain. 



Once in the Mojave Desert I was startled by a z-z-z-z-m, like the whir 

 of a rifle-bullet, which whizzed passed my face, and, like a flash, a black- 

 throated hummingbird curved, and, mounting again a hundred feet in the 

 air, fell toward me with a buzzing roar calculated to make one dodge. 

 Almost at my elbow I found the female on a downy little nest secure 

 amidst the thorns of a prickly cactus. Two days before this, I was standing 

 on a bare knoll, when away in the distance I heard the call of the poor-will, 

 a cousin to the nighthawk and whip-poor-will. I listened as the call was 

 repeated again and again, when suddenly, from within ten feet of me, the 

 mate left her eggs and flew away in the direction of the call. The eggs 

 were the exact color of the yellow clay on which they rested, without a 

 nest, unless a mere brushing of the gray dust and dried stems from the 

 spot constituted such. The mottled mother could not be distinguished 

 from a dried leaf, and so had escaped my attention. 



Some years ago I ran across a number of Panamint Indian boys out 

 hunting with bows and arrows, and found that they had, together with 

 other birds, a duck which they had killed on an alkali lake just west of 

 Death Valley. This was the first duck I had ever seen in the desert, but 

 later was much surprised at what I found at Owen's Lake, that remnant of 

 the prehistoric inland sea which once covered a good part of Nevada and 

 some of eastern California. Here I found the shores of the lake literally 

 lined with dead ducks. I took pains to count some of them, and found 

 one hundred and two lying in a space two hundred yards in extent along 

 the shore. I could account for the strange occurrence in no other way than 

 that bands of ducks had journeyed over the deserts in their migrations, and 

 finally alighted on this great sheet of water thoroughly exhausted. The 

 tremendous percentage of soda and alkaline matter makes the water im- 



F)ossible to most life; so these birds had been unable to find food after their 

 ong journey and had perished. Once I found a blue-winged teal swim- 

 ming in a crater-like warm spring in the Colorado Desert, and I have little 

 doubt that some species breed in the desert where here and there a springy 

 marsh is found. 



