The Black-tailed Gnatcatcher 
The bird was, of course, trying to say buz bee after the manner of his 
kind; but it was with an entirely new accent. He tried to mew and buzz 
at the same time, but the mew had it. The sound produced was absurdly 
like that of a young kitten who should be plaintively demanding milk 
while spitting at the terrier. The Gnatcatcher did some other vocal 
stunts too, interspersing the pepper-box notes of the Cassin Vireo with a 
cat-call faintly suggestive of the roguish Chat, then mew-spitting again. 
As I stood motionless, the bird moved about demurely through a neigh¬ 
boring sage-bush, and though it eyed me intently, the incessant stream 
of vocables which it kept up seemed to have no particular bearing on the 
situation. There was an impersonality, a nonchalance, about the whole 
performance, which left one doubting whether, after all, these extraordi¬ 
nary and explicit noises might be coming from such a sedate source. 
And that is, honestly, about all that the writer knows at first hand 
of the Black-tailed Gnatcatcher. Laurels await the conscientious biog¬ 
rapher who will give us a full flesh-and-blood account of this elusive bird. 
Certainly the meager citations from early ornithological literature are 
principally concerned with matters of names and localities and dis¬ 
tinguishing marks, of little interest to us and none whatever to the birds. 
Yet it may be well to enumerate the contributing causes of this neglect or 
oversight or manifest failure. To begin with, the birds themselves are 
rather scarce and irregularly distributed. Californica is hardly a bird of 
the ceanothus, certainly not of the oaks, but keeps rather to the chamisal, 
or to shorter, more scattered growths of the desert. Even where it is 
thoroughly at home californica is much less in evidence than is obscura 
further north. 
Working with a difficult genus, Polioptila, science was slow to recog¬ 
nize the distinctness of the species californica, having buried it for years 
under the name melanura, which proved to be synonymous with plunibea. 
It was melanura, however (Greek for black-tail), which gave to us the very 
unfortunate “common” name which now handicaps the fame of californica. 
Black-tailed Gnatcatcher! Why, all Gnatcatchers (there are about 30 
of them) have black tails. As well speak of a Black Blackbird. The 
name Black-crowned Gnatcatcher might serve us well enough in dis¬ 
tinguishing from the Western ( P. ccerulea obscura), which has only a 
narrow V-shaped mark of black about the forehead and superciliaries. 
But then all male Gnatcatchers have more or less black about the head, 
and many of them are black-capped. To be at all consistent, we shall 
have to fall back upon a place- or circumstance-name. “California” is 
not suitable, because obscura is much more widely distributed through the 
State. Southern California is too cumbersome, Riverside (the place 
of original description) too local. Really, I think we ought to call it 
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