LEAD-COLORED BUSH-TIT. 121 
and firm, and the walls are usually so thick that the cavity is quite narrow. The 
mosses and lichens with which the outside is decorated give the nest a very peculiar 
and beautiful appearance. 
Mr. Robert Ridgway with the great ingenuity, peculiar to him, has given us a 
portraiture, at once so clear and vivid, of a pair of birds and their domicile (Plate VID), 
that any further description seems quite superfluous. 
According to Mr. B. Evermann, the Least-Tit is very numerous in Ventura County, 
Cal. There it prefers to nest in dense clumps of California live-oaks (Quercus agrifolia), 
about eight feet from the ground. He found a nest twenty-one inches long. The entrance 
was a little more than five inches from the top. 
NAMES: Busu-Tir, Least-Tit, Least Titmouse, Chestnut-crowned T itmouse.— Buschmeise (German). 
SCIENTIFIC NAMES: Parus minimus Towns. (1837). Poecile minimus Bonap. (1850). Psaltria minima 
Cass. (1853). PSALTRIPARUS MINIMUS Bonap. (1854). 
DESCRIPTION: Adult, ‘Dull Jead-color, frequently with a brownish or olivaceous shade, the top of the 
head abruptly darker—clove-brown or hair-brown. Below, sordid whitish or brownish-white. Wings 
and tail, dusky, with slight hoary edgings. Bill and feet, black. 
“Length, 4 inches or rather less; wing, scarcely or not 2 inches; tail, 2 inches or a little more.” 
Coues, B. C. V., p. 124. 
LEAD-COLORED BUSBH- TIT. 
Psaltriparus plumbeus Batrv. 
Als*HE PLumMBEous or LEAD-COLORED BusuH-TIitT, ranges from New Mexico and Arizona 
¢ a northward to eastern Oregon and western Wyoming. Dr. Elliott Coues found it 
common in Arizona. 
“These queer little elfs,’’ he writes, “‘were very numerous about Fort Whipple, 
where I saw them all the year round, and learned as much about them as any one 
seems to know. Though living in a coniferous region, they avoided the pine forests, 
keeping in oak scrub of the hill-sides, and the undergrowth along the creek bottoms and 
through the numerous ravines that make down the mountain sides. They endured, 
without apparent inconvenience, an extreme of cold which sometimes proved fatal to 
birds of much more seeming hardihood, like Ravens for instance; and were as active and 
sprightly in the depth of winter as at any other time. I used to wonder how they 
managed, in such tiny animal furnaces, to generate heat enough to stand such a 
climate, and speculated whether their incessant activity might not have something to do 
with it. They always seemed to me model store-houses of energy —conserved to a degree 
in cold weather, with consumption of no more than was needed to keep them a-going, 
and thus accumulated for the heavier draft required when, in the spring, the arduous 
duties of nest-building and rearing a numerous family devolve upon them. Their food 
at this season consists of various seeds that persist through the winter; during the rest 
of the year, different insects contribute to their subsistence, and foraging for the minute 
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