70 
THE condor 
Voi.. VI 
eight or ten inches. Some of these might easily have been dropped by the birds in 
bringing them to the nest, for many of them are heavy loads for such slender bills 
at best, but it is of course impossible to imagine that such accumulations of stones 
could be the result of accident. 
In rock walls filled with cracks and openings that, to the superficial glance 
look just alike for miles, might it not perhaps be a help to have a stone walk be- 
fore the one crack you lived in? The question leads back to the more far reaching 
one — how do birds locate their nests and young? Is ‘intuition’, a ‘sense for locality’ 
helped out by observation of details such as might be noted by men? The subject 
offers an interesting field for observation. It would be interesting, also, to find 
out whether Salpinctes uses stones in its nests in other formations than sandstone, 
where small light stones are not so readily found for the looking. In other words, 
how general is the Salpinctian use of stones, and what proportion of nests have 
the walks leading away from them? 
\Vashingto7i, D. C. 
ROCK WREN NEST IN CLIFF 
Some Winter Birds of the High Sierras 
BY WIl.l.IAIU W. PRICK 
ILLUSTRATED WITH PHOTOdRAPHS BY THE AUTHOR 
B y December or January winter has closed down over the High Sierra and it 
does not lift until June. The snow falls day after day, not in light playful 
flurries, but in great heavy flakes out of a leaden sky, .so thick you cannot 
see a hundred yards. This snow piles up deep on rock and tree, two or three feet 
in a night, an even blanket over all the landscape. Or the snow may come with 
