April 1904] BIRDS 'OF THE HUACHUCA MOUNTAINS, ARIZONA. 23 



open ground, it loves the dense, impenetrable scrub oak thickets of the 

 "hillsides better than any other place, though also found along the can- 

 yon streams wherever the trees grow thick enough to prevent the sun 

 from penetrating. It seldom ascends the mountains to any great height, 

 7500 feet being about the upward limit of the species, and it is most 

 abundant below 6000 feet. They breed down quite to the mouths of the 

 canyons, and on one occasion during the migration I secured one in a 

 wash over a mile from the mountains. This, however, is quite except- 

 ional. These flycatchers "begin to arrive early in April, the first noted 

 being on April 6, but it is a week or ten days later before they are at all 

 abundant. They seem to disappear during the breeding season, and 

 though really very abundant, their plaintive note, heard occasionally 

 from some dense thicket is almost the only evidence that the birds are 

 still around. Consequently not a great deal is known of their breeding 

 habits. All the nests I have seen, some six or eight, all told, were built 

 at a considerable distance from the ground, from twenty to fifty feet. 

 They seem to breed rather late, as Mr. Howard secured a set on June 

 17, 1902, and on July 25 I shot a young bird which had only just left the 

 nest. They begin to leave as soon as the young have attained their 

 growth, being about the first of the summer residents to move south. 

 Their numbers decrease rapidly after the end of July, and by the middle 

 of August there were practically none left in the mountains. I saw no 

 more, and supposed that they had all left, until September 3, when I 

 came onto a pair of the birds feeding several young. This was right at 

 a place where Mr. Howard had secured a set of eggs earlier in the sea- 

 son, and I have no doubt that, as neither of the parent birds were shot, 

 they reared another brood and were correspondingly delayed in leaving. 

 Young birds collected, of various ages, differ from the adults in having 

 the upper parts more of a brownish color, and the lower breast and 

 abdomen, light yellow in the adult, very pale, in some cases almost 

 white with just the faintest tinge of yellow; wing coverts, tertials and 

 secondaries are broadly, and primaries narrowly margined with -rusty 

 fulvous, while the rectrices are broadly margined with the same. 



Sayornis saya (Bonaparte). Say Phoebe. 



Resident in the foothill region, and along the base of the mountains 

 generally, though in limited numbers. During the migrations they 

 appear rather more numerously, but never venture far up into the can- 

 yons. A favorite nesting site is a well or some similar excavation, or 

 an old abandoned adobe house. At the postoffice at Turner, some six 

 or seven miles below the mountains, a pair of Say Phoebes has built a 

 nest over the doorway, and bred there for many successive seasons ; and 

 not only do they breed there year after year, but the same individual 

 pair of birds seems to stay there the year through. 



Sayornis nigricans (Swainson). Black Phoebe. 



The Black Phoebe occasionally breeds in the Huachucas up to as 

 high an altitude as 6000 feet, but it is anything but a common bird in 

 this region and does not remain at all through the winter .months. The 

 earliest date at which I saw any was March 15, 1903, when a single bird 

 was seen ; for the next week or two an odd bird was seen now and then 

 evidently migrating, and after that, no more appeared. About the first 

 of August they began to appear in the lower parts of the mountains, 

 evidently moving up from the river valleys where they breed in greater 

 abundance. At this time they were just commencing the autumnal moult 



