96 
A Bunch of Texas and Arizona Birds. 
it goes, but falls far short of telling the 
whole truth about him; for not only is 
his head of a fiery hue, but his whole 
body as well, with the exceptions already 
noted. In size he ranks between the 
least flycatcher and the wood pewee. In 
liveliness of action he is equal to the 
best of his family, with a flirt of the 
tail which to my eye is identical with 
that of the pheebe. His gorgeous color 
is the more effective because of his aerial 
habits. The tanager is bright sitting 
on the bough, but how much brighter he 
would look if every few minutes he were 
seen hovering in mid-air with the sun¬ 
light playing upon him! 
Certainly I was in great luck, and I 
felt it the more as day after day I found 
the dashing beauty in the same place. 
I could not spend my whole winter va¬ 
cation in visiting him, but I saw him 
there at odd times, — nearly as often as 
I passed, ■—-until February 17. Then 
he disappeared; but a week later I dis¬ 
covered him, or another like him, in a 
different part of the valley, and on the 
26th I saw two. The next day, for the 
first time, one of the birds was in voice, 
uttering a few fine, short notes, little 
remarkable in themselves, but thorough¬ 
ly characteristic; not suggestive of any 
other flycatcher notes known to me; so 
that, from that time to the end of my 
stay in Tucson, I was never in doubt as 
to their authorship, no matter where I 
heard them. 
All these earlier birds were males in 
full plumage. The first female — her¬ 
self a beauty, with a modest tinge of 
red upon her lower parts — was noticed 
March 5. Males were now becoming 
common, and on the 9th, although my 
walks covered no very wide territory, I 
counted, of males and females together, 
seventeen. From first to last not one 
was met with on the creosote and cac¬ 
tus-covered desert, but after the first 
few days of March they were well dis¬ 
tributed over the Santa Cruz and Rillito 
valleys and about the grounds of the 
university. I found no nest until March 
27, although at least two weeks earlier 
than that a female was seen pulling 
shreds of dry bark from a cottonwood 
limb, while her mate flitted about the 
neighborhood, now here, now there, as 
if he were too happy to contain himself. 
The prettiest performance of the 
male, witnessed almost daily, and some¬ 
times many times a day, after the ar¬ 
rival of the other sex, was a surprisingly 
protracted ecstatic flight, half flying, 
half hovering, the wings being held un¬ 
naturally high above the back, as if on 
purpose to disjday the red body (a most 
peculiar action, by which the bird could 
be told as far as he could be seen), ac¬ 
companied throughout by a rapid repe¬ 
tition of his simple call; all thoroughly 
in the flycatcher manner; exactly such 
a mad, lyrical outburst as one frequently 
sees indulged in by the chebec, for in¬ 
stance, and the different species of 
phoebe. In endurance, as well as in 
passion, Pyrocephalus is not behind the 
best of them, while his exceptional 
bravery of color gives him at such mo¬ 
ments a glory altogether his own. Some¬ 
times, indeed, he seems to be emulous of 
the skylark himself, he rises to such a 
height, beating his way upward, hover¬ 
ing for breath, and then pushing higher 
and still higher. Once I saw him and 
the large Arizona crested flycatcher in 
the air side by side, one as crazy as the 
other; but the big magister was an aAvk- 
ward hand at the business, compared 
with the tiny Pyrocephalus. 
It was good to find so showy a bird 
so little disposed to shyness. At Old 
Camp Lowell, where I often rested for 
an hour at noon in the shade of one of 
the adobe buildings, the bachelor winter 
occupants of which w r ere kind enough to 
give me food and shelter (together with 
pleasant company) whenever my walk 
took me so far from home, our siesta 
was constantly enlivened by his bright 
presence and his engaging tricks. One 
day, as he perched at the top of a low 
mesquite, on a level with our eyes, I 
put my glass into the hand of the younger 
