6 Bird - Lore 
On April 20, three days later, I visited the spot. One young was gone, The 
mother again played the coward. The accompanying i situ photograph of the 
one remaining young was taken from the sister tree. On April 23, the nest was 
empty. I thereupon vowed 
eternal hatred to all Pifion 
Jays. It was their work, I 
am sure. 
No other nest was found. 
All the early -summer 
through, that imperious and 
insistent “ Pee-tiv, pee-tiv, 
pee-tiv-tiv-tiv” might be 
heard among the shale hills 
of Weston county, or on the 
venerable slopes of the Bear 
Lodge, full sixty miles away. 
More remarkable still, par- 
ent Crossbills were more than 
once observed feeding juve- 
niles that were, unquestion- 
ably, at least three months 
old, with beaks yet not fully 
developed. A delicious bit 
of a drizzly-day story must 
end this little sketch: Atop 
the Bear Lodge Hills, in 
Crook county, Wyoming, one 
June day, I followed a mani- 
festly fidgety Western Tanager on a most provokingly futile bit of a wild-goose 
chase. This ended, as such quest often does, by the connubial bird depositing 
her nesting material at no end of a distance from the one sacred spot where it 
really belongs. And the rain, it rained! But then followed a piece of the rarest 
good luck. A female Crossbill was gathering shreds of cedar bark. She flitted, 
oblivious of the black slicker below her, to the mid-branches of a small bull- 
pine. And there, quite near the trunk, was the rudiment of a nest. 
The material was lightly spread, and then she sat upon it. But, when I looked 
for her to go away again, in a few moments, after more bark, she went not. 
Then I trained the field-glass upon her, and waited for an explanation. It came 
soon. Beneath her, as she now and then arose, gingerly, upon her toes, there sat, 
I saw, a most bedraggled juvenile.—soaked through, yet apparently cheerful, 
withal. And who would not be, if his mother, finding the weaving of a fiber 
blanket upon somebody’s deserted bed futile to fend the rain, should straight- 
way make a blanket of her own clothing? 
NEST AND ONE YOUNG OF CROSSBILL 
