68 
THE CONDOR 
| Vol. VIII 
above the ground. The birds entered these boxes thru small holes in the bottom 
which seemed hardly large enough to admit the body of the bird, and an amusing 
thing to me was to see the little fellows with great bunches of nesting material in 
their beaks working like troopers and never stopping at the entrance hole but fair- 
ly diving up thru it; if it’s possible to dive up. 
I inquired of some of the linemen as to whether or not the English sparrow 
had been seen in Tucson in previous years and could learn of only one pair which 
had nested in one of these same boxes the previous year. I am quite sure this is 
the first record for Tucson, for in eight seasons’ collecting in Arizona I stopped at 
Tucson each year and would hardly overlook a bird so conspicuous. The same 
season (1904) I saw a single pair of the sparrows at Tombstone, Arizona, and 
Mr. F. C. Willard also saw a pair of the birds at Tombstone, being the first record 
for that town. I do not know of any other records for Arizona tho the birds may 
be common in some of the northern towns. 
One would naturally think from the notes gathered that the English sparrows 
are gradually closing in on southern California and that before many moons we 
can expect to see them in the streets of Los Angeles. Should this come to pass 
there will be a good chance for the Cooper Club to do some missionary work by 
taking steps to keep this pest from multiplying. The house finch, or linnet, seems 
to take the place of the English sparrow in this locality and is also considered a 
pest, but holds no comparison in that regard, to the English sparrow. I fear the 
house finches would not last long if the sparrows once got a good start 
Los Angeles , California. 
The Calaveras Warbler in Western Washington 
BY C. W. AND J. H. BOWEES 
T HE Calaveras warbler (. He l mim hop hi la rubricapilla guttural is), altho a 
rare summer resident, is of rather more general distribution than even a 
seasoned observer would at first be led to think. Their extreme shyness 
makes it almost impossible to get more than an occasional glimpse of the birds as 
they dodge into cover, and only the singing of the males gives the bird student 
any definite idea of their whereabouts. They make their first appearance in the 
vicinity of Tacoma early in the third week of April, and by the third week of 
May all the migrants have passed northward and only those intending to raise 
their young are to be found. 
The males, during the first sunny days after their arrival, seem almost too full 
of the joy of living to contain themselves. At this season only they are not par- 
ticularly shy, and they have a very pleasing habit at times while singing, that I 
have seen in no other warbler, namely, that of hovering thru the air for a dis- 
tance of fifteen or twenty yards. The manner of flying at these times is very slow 
and closely resembles that of one of the marsh wrens, but the beak is turned up- 
wards and the feathers on the swelling throat separate until it seems almost cer- 
tain that the bird will sing himself into some serious bodily mishap. 
Like the hermit warbler, a bird of the higher altitudes in the mountains of 
California, the Calaveras warbler, on reaching the cooler climate of the northwest, 
