18 THE CONDOR Vol. XX1 
note’’, but it is more nearly a bell-like croak, a ghostly, ventriloquistie, droning 
sound, a rusty hinge creaking in the wind, a voice of conscience coming from no 
whither and heard within. 
But the bird was not to be found at the base of a certain preappointed tree. 
Nor yet was it found with the nearest neighbors. What could have become of it? 
A quickened and then an anxious search followed. But there were no more 
leadings from the birds. Frantically I examined every tree base within a hun- 
dred yards. Nothing doing. This repeated loss of time was getting serious. Fer- 
vently I prayed, ‘‘Oh, Lord, let me succeed just this once’’. I half believed the 
answer would come, but I had some misgivings as touching the efficacy of the 
bird’s prayer. 
Well, before I went back to camp I would toil up the hill and see if there 
was anything doing on the hillside, where I had seen the bird disappear. Cun- 
ning hidey holes there were at the bases of the trees, but no nest. A bit of moss 
which protruded from a tree-trunk, a noble bole 314 feet in diameter, a little 
below where the regular coating of HKvernia commenced, attracted my eye. It 
seemed to come from a hole rather than from the surface, as the other moss did. 
T leveiled the binoculars. There was quite a bunch of moss in the hole, and be- 
hind the moss a gray head and a—yes, I am sure that is a glittering eye. Why— 
why, that’s the tree where my bird disappeared! Jt flew straight into its nest 
and I never knew vt. But whoever would have thought of such a thing? An un- 
broken shaft of a sturdy live tree, forty feet to the lowest limb, and clad, as all 
proper fir trees are, from about twenty feet up—above the snow line—with a 
shaggy coating of Evernia hechen. Yet here was this hole as sharp cut as the 
print of a giant spear-thrust, eight feet up from the ground. 
Well, the bird flushed when I was within twenty feet and I never saw her 
again until the nest was gathered (perhaps I didn’t look very hard; I wasn’t in 
a sentimental mood). The hole was ten inches deep both horizontally and verti- 
eally, but was only four inches wide in the middle passage. The bird had shaped 
her architecture admirably to the accommodations and even sat with tail pointed | 
in—quite a luxury for cramped quarters. Nesting hollow 3 inches across and 
2 deep, grass and pine needles with twigs and abundant moss (Evernia lichen) — 
for the poreh and filling. Bird returned repeatedly and silently after nest was 
removed, but there was no further demonstration either on her part or that of 
the male. Eggs fresh as paint! 
218/4-16 Townsend Solitaire; alt. 8200; July 17: You never know your 
luck! Also, they nest anywhere. I had eaten my Monday lunch in a sunny 
clearing, which had once been swept by a landslide, but is now being re-covered 
with scattered saplings. After that I set out to cross the remainder of the clear- 
ing, when I spied a Townsend Solitaire sitting in the top of a smail sapling 
about fifty feet from. the edge of the woods. He was almost immediately joined 
by a bird which seemed to come up out of the open (dwarf) manzanita. There 
was a feeding scene, with some evidence of tender solicitude, whereupon both ad- 
jJourned to the woods. I followed, after an interval, and as I entered the somber 
depths a bird shot back past me into the open, and disappeared in a flash into the 
central depressed portion of the manzanita patch. I followed again in some be- 
wilderment, looked carefully at the bases of the few saplings in range, peeked 
under a few stones, and headed for another, for no particular reason, since it 
was one of hundreds. But out from under this one flushed Mistress Myadestes, _ 
and the secret was out,—218/4-16 Townsend Solitaire, right out in the open of ~ 
