236 American Birds 



and hummingbirds flashed about newly opened flowers. 

 As we ascended out of the cultivated district the hills were 

 splashed and streaked with yellows and blues and purples 

 of the wild flowers — golden poppies, yellow mustard, and 

 buttercups and purple lupines. Further up the road ceased 

 and we had to follow a cow trail. After we reached the 

 highest shoulder of the range we found the surface rocky 

 and broken. There was scarcely any vegetation on the 

 ridge except a scraggly growth of poison oak and chapar- 

 ral. We stood long and gazed at the wide stretch of the 

 whole valley. Far below and reaching inland from the 

 lower end of San Francisco Bay the ribbonlike sloughs 

 wound in and out, reaching far back like the tentacles of 

 a huge octopus. 



At the very top of the range the mountain breaks 

 abruptly off into the head of the big canon. This is the 

 native haunt of the golden eagle. A large sycamore tree 

 is rooted in the bed of the little stream. Four good-sized 

 trunks rise from the giant roots. To the branch bending 

 toward the valley, above the steep rocky slope, the eagles 

 had carried a small cart-load of sticks and worked them 

 into the forks where they branched, horizontal to the 

 ground. It was a platform five feet across, not care- 

 lessly put together, but each stick woven in to add 

 strength to the whole structure, as the stones are built 

 into a castle. 



Climbing one of the other trees the photographer put 

 up a tiny platform in the topmost branches, where the 

 camera was fastened and aimed downward at the aerie 

 twenty feet away. Nor was it an easy matter to photo- 

 graph in the top limbs of that sycamore, where a wrong 



