98 THE CONDOR Vol. XIX 



higher than my head down to the brook and so to a pasture beyond ; and along 

 the line of this fragrant fern trail sitting on my camp stool with the bracken 

 closing me in, the tips of the triangular fronds uncurling over my head, I spent 

 many pleasant hours watching the feathered passers-by. Once there came the 

 soft musical, almost tender ivick-up, wick-up, wick-up of a Red-shafted Flick- 

 er close beside me, and when the two went by, the if -if -if -if -if was heard. 

 After one of the big birds had flown overhead, a conspicuous object with its 

 red underwings and white rump patch, it lit on the shadowed side of a hemlock 

 trunk and vanished so completely that I could barely make out the form of its 

 head and neck. 



The small yellow forms of Lutescent Warblers were often seen during 

 June disappearing in the bushes about the garden and fern field, though the 

 quiet little birds were not so much in evidence as the Golden Pileolated Warb- 

 lers with their keener colors and louder voices. But on the first of July a 

 Lutescent was found feeding young near the fern trail. Twice it almost flew 

 into me, it was so preoccupied. As it went in and out of a small spruce and 

 flew back and forth over the bracken 1 had ample opportunity to notice how 

 well its soft green plumage toned in with the yellow green of the sunlit ferns 

 and spruces. 



The next day, as one of the white dogs was with me, I created quite a dis- 

 turbance down the fern trail. For how could anxious parents be expected to 

 distinguish between a white dog and a white cat? Though the voices of young 

 birds were heard, they were prudently kept out of sight. A female Black- 

 headed Grosbeak — with her yellowish brown breast and the white median 

 crown stripe that gives the odd effect of hair parted in the middle — flew onto 

 the tip of a young hemlock and said ick at us, but she did not seem greatly 

 disturbed and when her mate came he took us even less seriously, after intelli- 

 gent inspection beginning to sing. But the white dog marked us for suspicious 

 characters and a Seattle Wren came peering down at us, three black-capped 

 Pileolated Warblers looked enquiringly as they flipped through the bushes, a 

 Russet-backed Thrush and a Song Sparrow examined us, and a Rufous Hum- 

 mer glanced down as he whizzed by. 



Though there was no telling how many Pileolated Warblers and Russet- 

 backed Thrushes there were in the compressed fifty-rod nesting area, the Gros- 

 beaks were apparently the third pair in the immediate neighborhood. Farther 

 down the fern trail my attention was attracted by a Swallow note and looking 

 up, perched jauntily on top of an old gray stub was a rufous-backed Sparrow 

 Hawk, around whom, for reasons best known to themselves, two White-bellied 

 Swallows, perhaps my friends from the nest in the stub, were clamorously fly- 

 ing. 



VII. THE BAND-TAILS 



Near the foot of the fern trail one day I stopped to enjoy the view of 

 Miami Notch with its purple background, and to look up at a row of noble old 

 hemlocks and Sitka spruces fronting the strip of timber between the clearing 

 and the Bay, in which as it proved a flock of perhaps fifty of the large Band- 

 tailed Pigeons made their headquarters. Studying the line of tall trees, their 

 large trunks sun-patched, their branches waving in the afternoon sea breeze, 

 two stood out conspicuously, one a great clean boled spruce with big cushions 

 of moss on its branches, the other a bare-tipped lofty mast, good for passing 



