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160 THE CONDOR Vol. XXII 
though the bird was not secured it was plainly visible at a distance of not over 50 feet, 
as it sat on a fence post watching me. It was without doubt referable to this subspecies. 
This winter there has been a remarkable vertical migration of the Band-tailed 
Pigeon (Columba fasciata) from the higher mountains to the east of us, to the much 
lower canyons on the west leading, to the coast. Such a migration is a very rare event 
here, even for a few birds. This winter they have come down in good-sized flocks and 
have not appeared to be any more wild than Mourning Doves would be, It has not been 
in any way an unusual winter in the mountains, so their coming is rather hard to explain. 
There seem to have been an unusual number of the Whistling Swan (Olor colum- 
bianus) seen in the state this winter. In the latter part of January my attention was 
called to a large white bird flying north very high up and which was undoubtedly of 
this species. A few days afterwards three were reported to me as having been seen on 
a lake near here. Stephens, in his paper on the birds of San Diego County, mentions the 
species as “a rare winter visitant”. I have lived in the county for thirty years and 
never saw it before.—C. S. SuHarp, Escondido, California, April 15, 1920. 
Notes on Nutcrackers in Monterey County, California—Persistent reports during 
the past winter of the Clark Nutcracker, or Clark Crow as so many people call it (Nwci- 
fraga columbiana), at Pacific Grove and Carmel, Monterey County, California, finally 
proved too much for my curiosity to withstand and led me to investigaie the matter in 
person. A trip to Carmel was made on March 8, 1920, and one of these somber but saucy 
birds was about the first bird in view as the main street was reached. For the next 
two weeks one or more of these fellows was seen almost every day, although there were 
», couple of days toward the last of my stay when none was seen or heard. On those two 
davs I thought that they must at last have left for the higher altitudes which are their 
natural abode, but the succeeding days showed them to be still with us. 
While the Nutcrackers were usually in small companies they did not seem actu- 
ally to flock together and nine was the largest number that I was positive of having 
scen at one time. There may have been more in the town, but there appeared to be good 
reason to believe that there were not many more, if any, for the town is small and these 
birds are commonly very noisy. When this number had collected in a small area no 
others were heard, at any rate. 
The Nutcrackers had discovered that kitchen doors and back yards were good for 
some free “hand-outs’, and they systematically visited many such. While they fed to 
some extent on the Monterey pines, apparently more intent upon the tips of young buds 
than upon the contents of the cones, they picked also a good many scraps and bits of 
grain or crumbs in the streets, paying no attention to people twenty or thirty feet away, 
but becoming wary of closer approach. .They seemed to have certain hours for being in 
certain places, and for the first few days of my stay appeared in the street opposite the 
dining room window while we were at breakfast. 
The cook at the El Monte Hotel used to put some bits of food on top of an eight- 
foot stump, reachable from the kitchen steps, and this out-door dining room was visited 
at least once a day for quite a while. As the household cat also had an eye to this ar- 
rangement, which in fact was originally made on his account, and as his visits were 
very irregular we could not always count on when the birds would come to feed here, as 
the cat was apt to include his avian visitors among the list of edibles—as I found out to 
my sorrow. 
Dr. Walter K. Fisher, living in Pacific Grove, Monterey County, reported them as 
being there during the winter, and on March 22 I went over to stay a few days with him. 
There were some of the Nutcrackers in the town, but not as much in evidence as in the 
smaller town of Carmel. Dr. Fisher said that they seemed to come and go and thought 
that possibly they often made the trip from one town to the other, a distance of only 
three or four miles, with a hilly forest between. 
In Pacific Grove lived a young lady who had enjoyed the sort of education that 
trains the mind for accurate observation, and this lady told me that on March 24, while 
she and her mother were resting from a walk in a picnic ground outside the town limits, 
some Nutcrackers came around and were feeding on crumbs, etc., left by picnic parties. 
As they were watching them one of the Nutcrackers began gathering sticks and other 
