CHAPTER XI 



A WINTER IN THE SOLITARY WILDERNESS 



Throughout its entire length tlie nameless stream on tlie 

 banks of which we were now encamped ran between high 

 walls of rock, very steep in many places, which were covered 

 with a curtain of creepers. As the cold weather came on 

 this mass of creepers made a magnificent display of scarlet, 

 crimson, yellow, and brown foliage. It must have been a 

 favourite breeding- place of the small birds, for I found 

 hundreds of their old nests in it, and greatly surprised 

 was I to find one or two of these nests lined with hair 

 from the tails or manes of horses. It was not likely that 

 there were any horses within two or three hundred miles, 

 but the hair could not have been fetched by small, short- 

 winged birds from that distance. Whence, then, did it 

 come ? It seems unlikely that the wind could have driven 

 more than a few scattered hairs so far, but it might have 

 been brought here accidentally by travellers. 



In after years I often found substances utilised by 

 American birds which they could not have obtained 

 except by mere accident — paper, for instance, in Colo- 

 rado, in a part then probably fully a hundred miles from 

 tBe nearest European post. And paper, horse-hair, wood- 

 shavings, and rags are substances of which American birds 

 could have known nothing till within the last three or four 

 centuries, yet they are constantly used now, together with 

 many other much more incongruous substances. And 

 American martins now build in chimneys, and other 

 birds under the eaves and thatch of houses, and that in 



a country where there were neither houses nor chinmeys 



us „ 



