Sept., 1922 FROM FIELD AND STUDY 183 
inhabited by this chickadee, are, south of the vicinity of Point Sur, much restricted and 
far seattered. The last mainland representation of such forest is in the vicinity of 
Cambria, San Luis Obispo County, some 75 miles south-southeast of Point Sur. There 
are several square miles of woods there, consisting almost solely of the Monterey Pine 
(Pinus radiata). 
Mr. Joseph Dixon was collecting at Cambria, October 27 to November 3, 1918, and 
found Santa Cruz Chickadees to be not uncommon there; he took five skins (now nos. 
30232-30236, Mus. Vert. Zool.) on October 28 and November 1. There, then, is an ap- 
parently well established and rather far sequestered colony of the species. Comparison 
with seasonally similar specimens from the vicinity of Monterey shows the Cambria 
birds to average paler, nearer white, on the mid-ventral surface. This feature, however, 
is not pronounced enough or sufficiently uniform to warrant my considering it posi- 
tively of phylogenetic significance—J. GRINNELL, Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, Uni- 
versity of California, Berkeley, June 20, 1922. 
Road-runner Caught in the Act.—Probably everybody “has heard” that Road-run- 
ners eat the eggs and young of quail. Heretofore I have been inclined to class this 
rumor with the other one about their corralling rattlesnakes with cactus. 
On July 9 I was inspecting the quail crop at the Tome Gun Club, near Belen, New 
Mexico. On the bank of an irrigation ditch, grown to willow bushes with here and 
there a cottonwood tree, my dog flushed a quail, which looked like an old rooster. At 
the same time, from the same place, the dog flushed a Road-runner, which hopped into 
a cottonwood. A careful look showed the Road-runner sitting dead still among thick 
foliage, with a light-colored object in his bill. I shot him, and the dog retrieved. The 
dog then pointed under the same tree, another quail flushed (the old hen) and on look- 
ing carefully I discovered a whole brood of chicks scattering in the weeds. I then ex- 
amined the spot where the Road-runner had fallen, and found a dead chick, still limber 
and warm but unmutilated, matching the live chicks in size, and lying within a foot of 
the blood. The dead chick was still in the downy stage, with %-inch pin feathers on 
the wing—smaller than a domestic chick when hatched. 
The evidence is practically absolute that the Road-runner was caught in the act. 
His crop was empty. Possibly by coincidence, each of the five other Road-runners seen 
during the rest of the day were in the immediate vicinity of quail—Atpo LropoLp, Albu- 
querque, New Mexico, July 10, 1922. 
The Cedar Waxwing in Mexico.—On February 11 of the present year I was pass- 
ing through the town of Tehauntepec when I was greeted with what to me was a voice 
from the old home town, the low, subdued hiss of the Cedar Waxwing (Bombycilla cedro- 
rum). There were several small flocks of six or eight taking their morning’s exercise 
in a banana grove and apparently feeding there. During the next several days I was 
passing up the Tequixistlan River and saw several more flocks of about the same size 
along the trail. In the vicinity of Port Angel on the Pacific coast during the latter part 
of February and early in March there were a few of these birds scattered here and there. 
On April 16, while spending the day in Chapultepec Park in Mexico City, I was again 
pleasantly surprised to hear these same notes. There was a flock of twenty-nine birds 
circling around and occasionally settling in the pines, from which they flew down into 
the grass where they were foraging. Just a week later I was in the city of Mon- 
terey in the state of Nuevo Leon in the northern part of Mexico, where again I met a 
small flock of Cedar Waxwings. 
Tehauntepec is in the southern part of Mexico, is but a hundred feet or so above 
sea-level, is very hot, and has an abundance of irrigated tropical vegetation. The Te- 
quixistlan basin is under about the same conditions, but without the irrigated areas; 
Port Angel at this season is dry and the trees are for the most part bare. In all of these 
places the inhabitants are Indians. Mexico City is at 7600 feet elevation, and has a 
cool climate; its vegetation is of the Oregon or northern California type. In Chapulte- 
pec Park, the ancient Aztec kings, the subsequent Spanish conquerors, and the following 
Mexican presidents, have had their palaces. Monterey is but a few hundred feet above 
the sea, is very hot, and has the floral and faunal aspect, as well as the climate, of 
