The California Bush-Tit 



{JPsaltriparus minimus califomicus) 

 By Harry H. Dunn 



OR fourteen years have I lived in Southern California, and for the 

 last ten of these fourteen I have been interested in the study of 

 its birds, but in all this time, during which I suppose I have seen 

 the nests of at least half of all the birds that breed here, I have 

 found no one more interesting than the Bush-Tit. 



Wherever you go in the Golden State, south of the dividing line of the 

 Tehachepi mountains, from 2000 feet elevation in the coastal ranges to the 

 willow groves that border the sea, there will you hear the incessant chip- 

 cJiip-chip of these little Tits as they move ceaselessly up and down and around 

 the trunks and limbs of trees. In the piuey slopes they are met with but 

 sparingly, and in the zone lying between the actual rise of the mountains 

 and the oak flats — that sage-grown sand plat given over to Gnatcatchers and 

 Sparrows — the Bush-Tit seldom if ever appears. The oaks and the willows 

 seem to be their favorite trees. Often I have thought I had it figured out 

 to a nicety jnst which one of the two they liked best, and then would come 

 a long week or two collecting among the other kind of trees and I would 

 find so many of the little fellows hanging their beautiful homes in the shel- 

 tering branches that I would be compelled to change my mind. 



Frequently, in the Southern California hills a straight, tall sycamore 

 will rise from among the oaks. In these the Bush-Tits play and seek their 

 food of gnats, flies, worms in the crevices of the bark, etc., but I have yet 

 to find one of their nests in a sycamore. Even in winter, when the branch- 

 es of the sycamore are quite bare, and when the Orioles' nests show up for 

 hundreds of feet as they swing from the sycamore limbs, one never notes 

 the peculiar nest of the little Tits, though the oaks on the flat below usual- 

 ly keep several nests from season to season. Similarly, in the lowlands, 

 water beeches rise among the willow trees, but in these the Bush-Tits do 

 not seem to care to make their homes, though the Kingbirds and Crows and 

 the Long-eared Owls and the Red-bellied Hawks seem to prefer such exposed 

 situations. 



And even in his protected haunts, where tree-trunk and leaf and shad- 



