428 LAND BIRDS 



were frequently seen in motion and at rest. A unique 

 courtship that I saw was even more ardent than that of 

 the Anna hummer. Like a brilliantly polished bronze 

 pendulum, the gallant little lover swung in an arc of two 

 yards' extent back and forth for fully three minutes be- 

 fore his coquettish sweetheart. Before he had ceased 

 she darted out from her perch, and bill to bill they 

 whirled far up in the air until they looked like big 

 beetles. I think the flight must have taken them sixty 

 feet straight up. Then back they came and alighted two 

 feet apart on the same slender dead twigs. Four days 

 after this, the nest was discovered on the branch of a 

 low shrub in a very marshy place. It contained one egg 

 June 11, and the little bronze mother had begun to brood. 

 Her favorite feeding ground was twenty feet out on the 

 marsh, where it was too wet for me to follow, but she 

 seemed to be licking insects from a small whitish flower 

 among the reeds. Both sexes were astonishingly fear- 

 less, following a little, four-year-old Indian girl back and 

 forth, and evidently taking her red-gowned figure for an 

 animated blossom. 



Although so tiny, the male courageously attacked and 

 drove away a Brewer blackbird that had chanced to 

 alight in the bush containing the wee nest. This black- 

 bird was nesting in a hollow post which stood in four 

 feet of water fifty feet from the bush. His usual course 

 in leaving his nest was over the hummer's bush, and the 

 male seldom failed to dart out at him from his watch 

 tower near by ; but whether from natural pugnacity or 

 from a genuine regard for the safety of his own treasures. 



