38 
THE CONDOR 
Vol. XV 
earth is quickly despatched, and he is ofif again, while the slow eye, especially of 
the breeder of hens, settles upon the soaring- Bnteo as the presumptive culprit. 
While his visits to the poultry yard are by no means rare, and his offenses, judged 
from this narrow human angle, are serious, we shall not stop to plead the thou- 
sands of destructive squirrels which this bird accounts for, but only hasten on to 
view him, or rather her, at home. 
The first scene is a wild adobe amphitheater, the most distant in the “gen- 
eral view” herewith presented. A few shrubs manage to cling to the upper 
reaches of the great earthen funnel ; but as the walls descend the pitch increases, 
Fig. 11. Caught at Home: femaee prairie eaecon 
AT MOUTH OK NESTING CRANNY 
until the vortex, 400 feet below, is fronted by walls perpendicular, or even un- 
dercut. Here at a point midway of the basal wall. Truesdale’s practiced eye dis- 
cerned a Prairie Falcon squatting upon a shady shelf. I stood on the very upper- 
most brim of the funnel whose edges fell away sharply on either hand, and from 
my station it did not seem that a bird could find footing-, let alone lodgment, on 
the wall against which this Falcon had set herself. Yet a determined facing of the 
problem of approach brought a sure solution. We set an iron peg down some forty 
feet over the brim, then made fast and cast off the 6o-foot rope with which we 
were jirovided, and found that it thus exceeded the nest by fifteen feet. To have 
