THE-C9nL?R 



Volume IX January-February 1907 Number 1 



PHOTOGRAPHING MAGPIES 

 BY EDWARD R. WARREN 



IN many parts of the West the conglomeration of sticks and twigs, which a 

 magpie gathers for a nest, is a conspicuous object in the trees and bushes along 



the streams and elsewhere. Rude and shapeless as they look when viewed 

 from the outside, they are really comfortable homes; for inside the mass of sticks is 

 built a nest cavity of mud, lined with fine rootlets, and overhead is a roof of twigs, 

 with the entrance usually on the side, tho one occasionally runs across a nest with 

 little or no roof. The cavity is often eight to ten inches deep. The nest shown in 

 the picture is not the one in which the young birds lived; that was in a clump of 

 willows so thick that the nest would not photograph well. These nests are used 

 for several seasons: The one in which my family lived was occupied for at least three 

 summers, and in the winter of 1900-01 was partly destroyed by storms and the 

 weight of the snow; in the spring of 1901 a new nest wasbuilt in an adjoining clump. 



The nests of J^/ca p/ca hiidsonica are anywhere from ten to forty feet above 

 the ground; but I think between ten and twenty feet will cover three-fourths of 

 the cavSes. The one in the cut showing eight eggs was very exceptional, not much 

 over three feet from the ground to the front door: just a nice height for photo- 

 graphic purposes. I promised myself a nice series of pictures of the young birds 

 from that nest; but when I thought the time had come for them to be sitting up 

 and taking notice, and went there with the camera, I found someone else had also 

 taken notice and the nest was empty. 



The family of young birds whose pictures I did take were in a nest near 

 Crested Butte, Colorado, and, as luck would have it, I found them the very day 

 they hatched, so that their ages were known exactly. That was on the 27th da}^ 

 of May, 1900. It was my first season at photographing young birds and I tried 

 some impossibilities in the way of attempts at pictures in the nest. The picture 

 taken at thirteen days old, tho poor, shows their growth from the naked natal con- 

 dition during that time. At 18 days they had advanced still more, and another 

 three days showed an astonishing progress; for on the twenty-first day I had my 



