6 £be Marbler 



above my head, as I cautiously climbed into and explored several deep pot- 

 holes in one great seam of the butte-wall, there appeared abundant splashes 

 of bird-lime; revealing the little crevice wherefrom, a few weeks before, had 

 emerged a family of desert sparrow hawks, bound for the grass- hopper- 

 swarming sage-plains. In every little cup of wind-etched sand-stone ledge 

 there lay the shells of the seeds of the prevailing form of cactus. In these 

 nature-formed caches the masses of eaten seed had been accumulating for, — 

 who knows how long ? How many generations of kangaroo rats, wood rats 

 and Hespero-mice had battened, think you, on these apparently inaccessible 

 stores of the spine-defended cactus? But, naturally, the center of interest 

 was in the environ of the eyrie of the hawks. The home ledge was about 

 thirty or forty feet above the base of the cliff. The edge of the nest was 

 sheerly up from the base. Yet strangely enough, the area beneath the nest, 

 for at least a dozen feet outward, was clear of any evidence of the occupancy 

 in the sky-scraper above. Full fifteen feet from the rock-base one had to 

 go, in order to study the character of hawk-sanitation. Few remains, indeed, 

 were found here of any forms of prey. And yet a few flight-feathers of the 

 Magpie gave proof that Mag the Outlaw has at least one mortal enemy. 

 There were, also, a few bones. But of bird-lime there was plenty, indeed. 

 Its distance from the source of supply would have been inscrutible to one un- 

 versed in the ways of a hawk. Facts, however, gave little wonder to one 

 who had learned, — not through surveys of nests of tiee and rock but of a 

 nest on the ground, — not in Wyoming but in the Dakotas, — how cleanliness 

 of nest is secured, with hawks, by the young elevating their howitzers a 

 little above the horizontal: and then firing their ammunition, point-blank, 

 into space. 



Every possible effort was made to learn the spirit and attitude of the 

 parent hawks toward the hapless young bird marooned on earth; quite in- 

 accessible to his two little brothers of the air; and beneath the dignity of his 

 aerial parents. Yet no amount of imaginative ingenuity could hypnotize 

 me into believing that he had not passed utterly out of their care. 



So few of the young of this race have been studied at the peculiar period 

 of plumage-development in question that this youngster, which I felt com- 

 pelled to adopt, received not a little attention. Even the monochrome val 

 ues of the half-tone give fair suggestion of the plumage. The unabraded 

 white of the terminal tail bar was very conspicuous; and the fulvous of the 

 entire tail was more suggestive. The whitish of the under parts was slight 

 ly tinged with fulvous; and even the illustration shows the nascent ''cravat" 

 of brown which the Krider Hawk shares with his smaller off-cousin of Swain- 

 son name. (The dark breast area is, of course, smaller than in swainsom.) 

 [X] A strange feature of the bird's condition lay in the manifest presence of 

 mites about the neck. (A negative of this specimen, with head down-turned, 

 shows the area in question to be nearly bare.) 



