222 Nelson, The Imperial Ivory-billed Woodpecker. fjuly 



pine from which the bark had fallen, and judging from the fresh 

 color of the wood within it could not have been over a year old. 

 The following year one of my companions, Mr. Winton, returned 

 to this district and learned that the Ivory-bills breed there in 

 February. An Indian boy employed by him managed to secure 

 two eggs, one of which he broke descending the tree and the 

 other was placed inside his shirt for safe keeping. On the way 

 home he started to drive some cattle and while running after 

 them fell and thus destroyed the only eggs of this species ever 

 taken. A nest visited the first of March contained newly hatched 

 young, and in April they had flown. One of the striking charac- 

 teristics of these birds is their general custom of remaining in 

 family parties during the fall and winter. They apparently have 

 strong local attachments as shown by the persistence with which 

 the party near our camp remained in its accustomed haunts 

 although hunted for several days in succession. During our stay 

 in this district these birds passed the middle of the day roaming 

 through thin parts of the forest or about the borders of grassy 

 parks. They seemed particularly partial to the dead trees along 

 the borders of partly cleared cornfields. In the Nahuatzin district 

 we found them only where the forest was almost entirely made up 

 of Montezuma pine [Pitius montezujnce) and did not see them 

 alight on any other tree. Their range in this region appears to 

 be restricted to the rather narrow belt along the top of the main 

 central ridge of the Sierra Madre which lies above an altitude of 

 7000 feet. This belt is more like a rolling and irregular table- 

 land than the summit of a great mountain chain, and its open 

 pine forest, broken by grassy parks, reminds one strongly of the 

 Mogollon plateau of northern Arizona. 



While in the northern part of the Territory of Tepic in 1897, 

 we met a' trader returning from a trip to the City of Durango 

 who showed us a roughly made skin of a male Ivory-bill which he 

 had secured in the Sierra Madre of Durango and was taking as a 

 great curiosity to his home in the hot country. 



The Imperial Ivory-bill is a bird of the pine clad mountains of 

 the Transition life zone and although various naturalists have 

 looked for it without success in the mountains of southern Ari- 

 zona, there is still a probability of its occurrence there. 



