188 East and West 
‘talons. Desert sparrow-hawks are abundant 
and rarely a golden eagle crosses the blue 
dome with superb flight and disappears, 
leaving one with the sense of having witnessed 
something admirable and perfect in its way— 
a flight symbolic of freedom and power. 
Sometimes the little diurnal owl is seen peering 
from its hole in a saguaro, and once it flung 
itself upon the trail in front of me, barely 
missing a scurrying mouse. Of reptiles there 
are none in winter: their time is not yet, and 
both the Gila monster and the rattlesnake 
are safely underground. 
It is the birds which are the friends of my 
leisure and my solitude, here as elsewhere. 
The sociable and garrulous Gila woodpeckers 
call from the Doric columns of the saguaro in 
which they nest early in February. One 
large cactus contains twenty-one woodpecker 
holes, though apparently but one pair are 
nesting in it, so that these holes show it to 
be an ancestral tree in which many genera- 
tions have dwelt. Both the red-shafted and 
gilded flickers occur here and their call is to 
the mesas what the Eastern flicker’s is to the 
pasture—a contented, self-reliant, cheery note 
that is good to hear. 
Gambel’s partridge appears to be the only 
