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Volume XI 
May-June 1909 
Number 3 
THE WHITE-THROATED SWIFTS ON SLOVER MOUNTAIN 
By WILSON C. HANNA 
WITH ONE PHOTO BY THE AUTHOR 
T HE last of December, 1907, found me with a strong desire to find and secure 
the nest and eggs of the White-throated Swift ( Aeronautcs melanoleucus) . 
This may seem to be an early date to begin to make arrangements, but to tell 
the exact truth this was not the first time that I had had such a fanciful desire. It 
was during one of the nice warm days in the above mentioned month that I became 
convinced that some of these most interesting birds had made their home on Slover 
Mountain. 
Slover Mountain, a land mark of the San Bernardino Valley, is an isolated hill 
of solid limestone situated about a mile southwest of the busy little city of Colton. 
It rises to about 500 feet above the floor of the valley, this being about 1500 feet 
above sea level. Old Slover has always been famous as a look-out point for resi- 
dents of the valley and no tourist has seen the valley properly without the view 
from Slover. During the past twenty years this old hill has been the seat of ever 
growing commercial activity, and with large cement works on two sides of the hill, 
marble works, lime kilns, quarries, etc., one would scarcely expect to find it the 
home of the White-throated Swift. The continual blasting in the many quarries 
and the many holes on the hill have made it so dangerous to visitors that few would 
care to risk the ascent even if they could obtain permission from the California 
Portland Cement Company to do so. One of the treacherous places has proved to 
be a boon to the swifts, and it is with the swifts in this old abandoned quarry on the 
highest part of the mountain that this article is to deal. 
The old quarry is noteworthy not only as being the home of the White-throated 
Swifts, but as the quarry from which the rock was obtained in the early nineties to 
manufacture the first Portland cement west of the Mississippi River, and the 
removal of rock from this quarry consumed the very highest point of the hill. 
When the cement company abandoned this quarrj^ about 1896 for more accessible 
workings a couple of hundred yards away, they left a narrow gulch about twenty 
to thirty feet wide, one hundred and twenty-five feet long, and with two almost 
perpendicular faces of limestone, as much as seventy-five feet high in some places 
