Mar., 1917 BIRDS OF THE HUMID COAST 53 



seemed too sharp a perch for even his tiny feet. When the fireweed bloomed 

 the Hummingbirds were seen around that as they were around the handsome 

 pink spikes of Canterbury bells. One that I watched feeding from a bell first 

 put his bill into the lip of the flower, standing in air with feet held close to his 

 body, wings whirring, and tail at an angle ; then, failing to reach the insect- 

 fraught honey, probed deeper and deeper till he had climbed bodily up into 

 the pink tube. But this Troglodytean method was apparently distasteful to 

 the little Ariel, and quickly withdrawing he fell to probing the bases of the 

 bells from the outside. 



A stub watch tower vacated by a Hummer was taken possession of by a 

 magenta headed California Purple Finch, so popular are bare outlooks among 

 the dense evergreens of the Humid Coast. A dull streaked female, presum- 

 ably his mate, was also discovered near by. At another time looking across the 

 partly shaded brook a gleam of magenta was detected and enjoyed as every 

 gleam of color is in that land of dark shadows. 



V. BY THE SIGN OF THE SPRUCE STUB 



As the wood road came out into the clearing, a white tent on a high frame 

 foundation on investigation proved an improvised chicken house. What had 

 been a field of bracken two years before when the New England family set- 

 tled there, was now hen yards, flower and vegetable gardens, a substantial 

 conquest indeed, for in clearing the land the long roots of the bracken have to 

 be laboriously dug up, and as the man of the house was a nightwatchman 

 across the bay, the main part of the work had devolved upon his resolute wife, 

 who had followed her children's children across the continent to make this new 

 home. With quiet pride she showed her New England garden in which, under 

 the shadow of a giant spruce stub, bloomed pansies, sweet peas, sweet Williams, 

 and many a familiar home flower. A well stocked vegetable garden added 

 proof of what an enthusiastic woman can do with nature in her Oregon strong- 

 hold. 



Though the acres surrounding the house had been wrested from nature the 

 stub of the old giant spruce on the edge of the garden still dominated the land- 

 scape. It was apparently the largest in the neighborhood, measuring thirty- 

 nine feet eight inches in girth, four feet above the ground. Dwarfing every- 

 thing in sight it bore silent testimony to the nobility of the forest that formerly 

 possessed the land. But at the sawmill that the nightwatchman guarded an 

 occasional spruce would yet come in, twelve feet through, so large that it had 

 to be dynamited and quartered before it could be gotten into the mill. In the 

 mountains trees six feet in diameter eight or twelve feet above the ground were 

 said to be common, supplying at the mills six lengths twenty-four feet long, or 

 a hundred and forty-four feet below the branches. 



In one of the small stubs near the house, the New Englanders pointed out 

 with friendly interest a nest hole about twenty-five feet from the ground that 

 a family of Western Bluebirds occupied early in the summer, like eastern 

 Bluebirds coming to sit on the fence posts and get worms from the garden. 

 Many other birds came to sing on the edge of the clearing, the gardener told 

 me, but added regretfully that she did not know what they were. 



At the foot of the garden were a number of old snags, gray charred stubs 

 in which Tree Swallows nested. The gardener's sister, who from her window 

 in the peak enjoyed looking down on the snags and across to the mountains be- 



