26 £be Marbler 



In No. 3, we have the portrayal of a fact that is new to science. This 

 fact, so far as I know, was first made known to the world of bird students by 

 Prof. Silloway in his " Birds of Fergus County, Montana;" and this negative 

 is the first pictorial witness to the habitualness of the trait repeatedly noted 

 by Mr. Silloway. This keen teacher-student notes, in regard to several nests 

 of the Desert Horned Lark, in Fergus County, Montana: that they were 

 " banked round with bits of dirt or clods;" or with " fragments of cow-chips." 

 Of this sort of Rock- Wren-like decoration the writer has noted but two in- 

 stances: one in each of the two Wyoming counties above referred to. In the 

 Weston County case there were but two or three bits of gumbo, from a half- 

 inch to an inch in discal diameter. Of the same sort of paving in the Crook 

 County nest there were, by most careful count, no less than forty pieces. 

 These appeared to have been gouged out by the cattle hoofs; and gathered 

 by the larks not long after rain. It was, however, impossible to conjecture 

 whether or no such clods had been added, at varying times, after the first 

 completing of the nest. A habit so striking and so widely negatived pyany 

 evidence drawn from observations covering nests of any other Horned 

 Lark races ought certainly to stimulate any and all students of 

 nesting habit not utterly absorbed by the sordid and degrading habit of egg- 

 collecting for the mere collection's sake. 



It only remains to give another instance of shelter protection, much 

 like that just given: in this case, the protection of a not-large, not-heavy 

 mass of prickly pear, in an open area, among the sage brush: About a mile 

 from the IOI Ranch drift-fence the nest in question was found. It had been 

 betrayed, as usual, by the rising of the sitting Lark; when the approaching 

 man was yet some fifty feet away. The three eggs, appreciably darker and 

 more heavily dotted than the usual run of stippled drabs and greys, among 

 Horned Lark eggs, had been taken; and the site marked, for photographing, 

 at a less windy hour, by the tying of a small streamer of white cotton rag 

 to a sage-top. The morning hours and half the afternoon were then devot- 

 ed to a harum-scarum, unsophisticated search after Curlew nests: on the 

 part of an eager mortal whose wit proved dull, indeed, when pitted against 

 the cunning of the wonderfully nonchalant yet watchful sickle-bills. 



In the stiller hours of the early-summer afternoon the Man and the Cam- 

 era set out, over the divide, for the Horned Lark valley. There, however, all 

 was changed. At edge of the half-dry wash, at the bottom of the valley, a 

 score of cow-horses were encircled by a rope corral. Near bv stood the chuck 

 wagon of ' Hundred-and-One; abutting, as usual, against its tent. And every- 

 where, on hill-side and in valley, were scattered bands of cattle gathered, 

 from scores of miles, during the June round-up, just closing. These, as they 

 shifted unceasingly, in their feeding, gave to the eye and brain an uneasy 

 hypnotic suggestion of swoon: a will-destroying impulse to dash, headlong, 

 beneath the feet of grazing cattle. 



