152 
THE CONDOR 
I VOL. V 
March, 1896, I heard that the jays were nesting on the ranch of a friend about 
sixteen miles north of my place, so I rode over there and on March 29th and 30th 
found several nests and took four or five sets of eggs. These were carefully 
packed in an old cigar box and stowed away in one of the saddle pockets, but un- 
fortunately as T was taking a rest and a lunch on my way home, the horse shook 
himself and of course the saddle also, with the result that most of the eggs were 
broken. 
In 1898 the professor arranged to visit this same ranch with me, and on April 
4th we started in an old buckboard and had a fairly successful trip, getting some 
good specimens of the birds and several clutches of eggs. The ranch is situated 
at the head of one of the main branches of the Guadaloupe and takes in some of 
the divide between that river and the Llano. As in other parts of the county the 
limestone rocks are in evidence everywhere. Numerous little valleys run down 
toward the rivers, becoming deeper and steeper as they approach the larger creek, 
and often forming narrow canyons with high bluffs on both sides. Large trees are 
not numerous, but the whole face of the country is covered with clumps of shin 
oak and scrubby live oak. In these clumps we found the jays’ nests, generally 
placed near the outside of a thicket, at from four to six feet from the ground, and 
often conspicuous from quite a distance, as the shrubs were only beginning to put 
out their leaves at that time. As a rule the birds were setting and one nest con- 
tained young nearly ready to leave it. The nests were composed of an outer bas- 
ket of twigs not very firmly put together, and lined rather neatly with grass, hair, 
and small root fibres. They were ratlier more bulky than mockingbirds’ nests and 
the inner nest was saucer shaped rather than cup shaped. Most of them were 
placed in the shin oaks, but .some few were in live oaks, and I have since found sever- 
al in cedar bushes. The birds are not so noisy as the common blue jay and are particu- 
larly silent when near their nests. They have a habit of hopping upwards through 
a thicket from twig to twig until they arriv’^e at the top of it, when they fly off with 
four or five harsh squeaks to the next clump of brush, into which they dive headlong. 
It was a very warm day with the thermometer in the shade of the gallery at the 
ranch standing well up in the nineties, and tramping about through the thickets 
and picking our way over the rocks was by no means light work, but the walk 
was so interesting that we did not have time to think of getting tired. Of course 
we found much to interest us besides the jays. An untidy platform of sticks in a 
small Spanish oak tree, proved on investigation to be a road-runner’s nest, contain- 
ing six eggs, which from their unusually clear appearance, were probably all of 
them fresh. One frequently finds eggs in different stages of incubation in a road- 
runner’s nest and .sometimes eggs and young birds or young birds of different sizes. 
Several times we disturbed deer. They were in their fresh summer suits of 
red, having already discarded their gray winter overcoats. As is so often the case 
when one is not hunting them, they would stop to take a second look at us, offer- 
ing pretty broadside shots at fifty or sixty paces. In one extra dense thicket at 
the head of a rough little hollow we found a pair of long-eared owls {Asio wilsoti-- 
ia7ms) the first we had ever seen in the county; and on a rocky ridge just beyond 
were a couple of burrowing owls. They flew a few yards and then settled on some 
rocks, nodding their heads at us in their usual ludicrous fashion. These owls do 
not breed in tliis county, but we see them every year in the spring and autumn. 
There are no prairie dog towns on this side of the Llano river, but plenty of them 
just across it and I have been told that the owls breed over there. 
Many small flocks of migrating birds were seen, some of them just arriving 
for the summer and others getting ready to leave us. Conspicuous among the 
