The Oregon Juncoes 



The mother bird, not without much misgiving and remonstrance, had just 

 visited her babies, so I rose to go; but as I did so, caught sight of a stout 

 garter snake, who lay watching the scene from a distance of fully twenty 

 feet, a wicked gleam of intelligence in his eye. With quick suspicion of 

 his purpose, I seized stones and hurled at his retreating form; but the 

 ground was rough and he managed to escape into a large brush-pile. At 

 table I ate hurriedly, listening the while for the faintest note of trouble. 

 When it came, a quick outcry from both parents, instead of premonitory 

 notes of discovery, I sprang to my feet, clutched a stick, and rushed down 

 to the spring. Alas for us ! Satan had found our Eden ! The nest was 

 emptied and the snake lay coiled over it in the act of swallowing one of 

 the little birds. Not daring to strike, I seized him by the throat and re- 

 leased the baby Junco, whose rump only had disappeared into the devour- 

 ing jaws. Then with the stick I made snake's-head jelly on a rock and 

 flung the loathsome reptile away. But it was all too late. One young 

 bird lay drowned upon the bottom of the pool, and the other (I think 

 there were only two) soon died of fright and the laceration of the hinder 

 parts attendant upon ophidian deglutition. It was all so horrible! the 

 malignant plan, the stealthy approach, the sudden alarm, the wanton 

 destruction of the fledglings, the grief of the agonized parents, the remorse 

 of the helper who came too late ! Is it any wonder that our forebears have 

 pictured the arch-enemy as a serpent? 



The Sierra Junco in California deserves to be called the Sierra Club 

 bird. On the annual pilgrimage of its members this famous organization 

 of mountaineers move about in a perfect halo of disturbed and protesting 

 Juncoes. And as often as the vacationers, two hundred strong, deploy 

 for the night over a lily-sprinkled meadow, a dozen pairs of Juncoes go 

 sleepless, or else abandon impossible charges. At the Vidette Camp in 

 1913 the ladies showed me four cold eggs in a nest so deeply recessed in 

 the bank of Bubb's Creek as to be entirely concealed from the vertical gaze. 

 Buried in the ground as she was, the bird had endured the frequent 

 proximity of the women passing to and from the creek, not three feet 

 away, without betraying her trust, until at last one lady inadvertently 

 emptied her half-drained drinking cup by a back-flip and sent the water 

 square across the entrance of this hidden domicile. Thereupon its indig- 

 nant mistress emerged, never to return. And of all the nests shown to 

 the bird-man that season by the courtesies of a hundred pairs of eyes, 

 fully three-fourths were those of Junco oreganus thiirberi. 



?P7 



