8o £be Warbler 



only. This is but relatively true, since I have found a pair or two in the 

 dense brush that grows along the seams and depressions of the sempiternally 

 springy sides of the base of Sundance Mountain. 



The studies made in this location illustrate, essentially, the marked 

 change in attitude and manner of the Geothlypis (and other) Warbler species 

 after the eggs are hatched. Gingerly tip-toeing my way amid luxuriant 

 growths of poison oak, beneath the welcome shelter, withal the fierce heat 

 of June, afforded by primeval burr-oaks, I heard the "jit" of a MacGillivray 

 Warbler uttered in a tone that told a tale of anxious motherhood. In a 

 brief instant, as my presence in the sacred precinct became known, an added 

 jit-ting made it plain th.a.t father was anxious, too. 



Oh, the rare, sly delusions into which that excited yet cunning pair of 

 birds repeatedly led me! Hiding places were rare, — for all the hated "ivy". 

 Yet finally, despairing of making a record in any other way, I found a snug 

 covert among some favorably situated willows. But even with -this incentive 

 to un-suspicion it was long before even the male bird ventured to feed his 

 offspring. As he finally disappeared, with a swift onrush, into a little clump 

 of willows, on the woodland margin, I rushed to the spot and was fortunate 

 enough to flush the last of the nestlings from the place where he was born, 

 this being a rough nest, 'heavily lined with black horse-hair, and set a few 

 inches above the ground amid the willows. 



There came a brave little rain-flood down Cambria canyon yesterday, 

 and going up this afternoon, as the shades were lengthening and the mid- 

 afternoon canyon-sunset drew on, to see how it fared with my favorite bird- 

 dwellers, I heard, amid the mockery of a long-tailed Chat, the family con- 

 versation of a pair of Tolmies whose first laying was despoiled by a heartless 

 ornithologist that I knew. The spot was but a hundred feet from the tangle 

 of roses and nettles wherein lay hidden the nest figured in the accompanying 

 illustration. On the steep bank, beside the creek, a very bower of roses 

 nodded in the waning sun-glow, and beneath their shelter and their beauty 

 and their fragrance my little Tolmies were talking softly to each other. 

 Contentedly, — so, at least, I love to imagine, — jit followed jit; and "jit", at 

 last, gave way to "jillis"; and the "jillis" wafted out its cadence into a 

 morendo — "Jillis,— jillis, jillis, jillis,— WHITTLE— whittle— whittle". 



