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CARON TOWHEE. 181 



here covered with straggling mesquite trees and bushes of various kinds, some of them 

 attaining a height of ten or twelve feet, interspersed here and there with cacti and 

 yuccas of different species, the cholla cactus predominating. The nests were usually found 

 from one to two hundred yards distant from the creek bottom and scarcely ever more 

 than a mile away from this, but never in the bottom proper, the chosen home of Abert's 

 Towhee. According to Mr. W. E. D. Scott, who has done so much excellent work in 

 Arizona in more recent years, the Canon Towhee is equally abundant in the neighboring 

 mountains and ranges well up to the pine forests. He found his first nests -in the Cata- 

 lina Mountains at an altitude of 3,500 feet, about the middle of March, and according 

 to him the breeding period extended well into July. To explore the same localities 

 that Mr. Scott did in 1883, would have been exceedingly unwholesome in 1872, on my 

 second visit to Arizona, and still more so in previous years. The chances would have 

 been more than even, that an inquisitive naturalist, venturing into the recesses of the 

 Catalina Mountains, even with a fair-sized and w^ell-armed party, would have been 

 himself collected sooner or later by one of Chief Cachise's enterprising cut-throats who 

 then roamed over these mountain ranges more or less at their own sw^eet will. The 

 ornithologist collecting in Arizona at the present day cannot imagine the changes that 

 twenty years have brought about in that country, and it is hard to realize the diffi- 

 culties under which the earlier explorers labored. It would take too much space to 

 enumerate even a few of these here, but having entered Arizona myself as early as 1857, 

 although I had no means to collect anything then, I am quite competent to judge what 

 risks and discomforts the pioneer naturalists of Arizona, Dr. Coues, Cooper, and Palmer, 

 underwent in the interests of science. Only on my second visit to the Territory in 1872 

 was I enabled to add a little to our knowledge of the avifauna of that even then still 

 little known region. Fortunately there was a cessation of hostilities, on our part only, 

 however, against the hostile Apaches, for a portion of the year, as peace commissioners 

 had been sent out from Washington to make terms with the hostiles, which enabled 

 me to make a few^ interesting discoveries w^hich I could not have done otherwise. 



"I found my first nest of the Canon Towhee on June 4, 1872; it contained two 

 fresh eggs, and was placed in a mesquite bush about four feet from the ground and not 

 particularly well concealed. According to my observations (I examined some seventy 

 nests) by Jar the greater majority were placed in low mesquite trees, sometimes close to 

 the trunk, in the forks of limbs, and again well out on a branch, rarely more than 

 eight feet from the ground. An occasional nest was placed in a cholla cactus. None 

 were found directly on the ground. The nest is a large one for the size of the bird, 

 loosely constructed externally. It is composed of weed stalks and coarse, dry grasses, 

 and is lined with fine thread-like rootlets and horse hair, when the latter is obtainable. 

 It is an -unusually deep nest 



"The eggs are usually three in number; about one nest in ten contains four; 

 occasionally I have found the bird sitting hard on but two, probably a second or third 

 brood. On comparing notes with Mr. Herbert Brown of Tucson, an enthusiastic 

 naturalist, who has made careful and extended observations over pretty much the same 

 ground I did in 1872, I found the nesting season of 1872 "must have been an ^inusually 

 late one, as he has since then found many species breeding there fully two months earlier 



