n8 
THE CONDOR 
VOL. V 
The observations on one pair of birds for a few years are limited to one day 
each year and during the short period of collecting the set, and owing to forced 
marches to and from the nest the time was necessarily short. It was in an amus- 
ing way that I became acquainted with the pair. Having formed the acquaint- 
ance of a miner, stockman and hunter in my home town during November 1897 
talk gradually drifted into ornithology and falcons. He told me there was “a pair 
of those bullet hawks” nesting on his ranch and we made arrangements for my 
visit in the spring. The following April I set out on my wheel and by late after- 
noon had made a creditable run over the- mountains and was suffering consider- 
ably from the intense heat. Water was hard to get owing to the drought having 
let the small streams run dry. Within a few miles of my destination was a small 
stock ranch and the proprietor, a young man, hailed me. 
“Say! where are you going with that fish basket?” 
“Fishing, of course!” I replied. 
“Oh! that’s played out. Do you know Harry Taylor?’’ 
This was too interesting to pass so we adjourned to the cabin and talked 
things over with spring-water lemonade and big black cigars, and incidentally I 
learned that Mr. H. R. Taylor of golden eagle fame and editor of the defunct Ni- 
dologist had been in this vicinity collecting annual rents from golden eagle nests, 
and I also found out where they were but did not visit them owing to a mutual 
understanding between self-respecting members of the Cooper Ornithological Club 
that the law is violated when one collector interferes with another’s nests, but I 
decided that the prairie falcon’s nest was mine by right of a grant from the lessee 
of the land four months before Mr. Taylor had visited it. He was shown to it by 
friends on the 226 to the 24th of March and obtained a set of five fresh eggs. 
By evening I had reached my destination and early next morning my host led 
the way over innumerable and rough trails through well wooded hills. Sycamore, 
alder, maple, oaks, an occasional laurel and madrone, with considerable under- 
brush skirted the creeks and dry water courses, while plenty of oaks were scat- 
tered about the hillsides together, with much promiscuous brush. One long range 
of hills was covered with chemise and sage only, rocky and devoid of grass, and 
and the only trees were small pines. On the south side of the canyon were thick- 
ets of manzanita, tough and unbending, the lower branches hard and sharp, a 
formidable phalanx of spears to break through. After two hours of hard rustling 
the ridge containing the nest was reached, rugged and rough, covered with manza- 
nita, prickly scrub-oak, sage, and cliemise contraril}’^ sending its slender but wiry 
branches with the downward slope of the hill, contesting our advance on an up 
grade. Here nature had piled her architecture of sandstone rock. Mimic cities of 
houses on the hills, pyramids of light-colored sandstone were scattered imposingly 
among the silvery-green pines, and castles of fantastic shapes rose majestically 
higher, while round about lay the fragments, large and small, of unfinished or dis- 
carded work. Turkey vultures, so many as twenty-seven at one time, were glid- 
ing closely overhead seemingly viewing the intrusion into their domain with sur- 
prise and distrust. An occasional western redtail appeared in the landscape of 
oak-dotted grassy knolls against the blue sky. Denizens of the sage, some variety 
of sparrows, too shy to identify, now and then flitted along. California tlirashers 
{Toxostoma redivivuni), natural born mockers, sang their matins or furnished mel- 
ody in various forms, far from view in the chemise and sage, while the harsh 
scream of the California jay or the cheery springtime call of the red-shafted flicker 
were carried along the canyon, across which was a battered and broken ledge no- 
where over 200 feet high, the home of the prairie falcon. We were now in a dry 
