WAVS OF THE VISCACHA 
have been greatly reduced by the farmers whose fields they 
damage. Viscachas are grayish animals, about twenty inches 
in length, with black and white faces, and with much the form 
of rabbits except that the ears are short and the tail rather long 
roy 
VISCACHA, 
and bushy. They live in companies of twenty to thirty, and dig 
deep and complicated burrows, often branching and commu- 
nicating, and having large craterlike openings, around which 
the earth is soon bared of vegetation; and they have a habit 
of dragging on to these hillocks of cast-out earth not only the 
remains of their food, which consists of grass, roots, seeds, 
thistle stalks, etc., but any bright object near by, so that when 
a traveler loses a small article he at once searches the nearest 
viscachera. These hillocks are the homes of several birds 
—one a small ground owl, the coquimbo, which, like our 
burrowing owl, lays its eggs in some unused tunnel entrance 
or often excavates a little cave for itself; another a small pas- 
serine bird, one of the wood hewers, which digs a nesting hole 
in the mound; and the third a swallow, which breeds in aban- 
doned burrows, as also do sundry foxes, snakes, etc. These last 
2E 417 
