101 
A Bunch of Texas and Arizona Birds. 
to have so much as referred to my own 
early lack of appreciation of their ex¬ 
cellence. Perhaps this was one of the 
times when the truth should not have 
been spoken. 
My mention just now of the wren’s 
cleverness in traveling over the steep 
side of Tucson Mountain called to mind 
a similar performance on the part of a 
very different bird — a road-runner — 
in the same place; and though it was not 
in my plan to name that bird in this 
paper, I cannot deny myself the digres¬ 
sion. 
I had taken a friend, newly inoculated 
with ornithological fever, down to this 
mountain-side road to show him a black- 
chinned hummingbird. We had seen 
it, to his amazement, on the very mes- 
quite where I had told him it would be 
(“Well! ” he said, —and a most elo¬ 
quent “well ” it was,— when I pointed 
the bird out as we came in sight of the 
bush), and were driving further, when I 
laid my hand on the reins and bade him 
look up. There, halfway up the precipi¬ 
tous, broken cliff, was the big, mottled, 
long-tailed bird, looking strangely out 
of place to both of us, who had never seen 
him before except in the lowlands, run¬ 
ning along the road, or dodging among 
clumps of bushes. Even as we looked 
he began climbing, and almost in no 
time was on the very topmost stone, at 
the base of a stunted palo-verde. There 
he fell to cooing (like a dove, I said — 
I forgot at the moment that the road- 
runner is a kind of cuckoo), and by the 
time he had repeated the phrase three 
or four times we remarked that before 
doing so he invariably lowered his head. 
We sat and watched and listened 
( “ There! ” one or the other would say, 
as the head was ducked) for I know not 
how many minutes, commenting upon 
the droll appearance of the bird, perched 
thus above the world, and cooing in this 
(for him) ridiculous, lovelorn manner. 
Then, as we drove on, I recalled the 
strangely rapid and effortless manner in 
which he had gone up the mountain. 
“He did n’t use his wings, did he? ” I 
asked ; and my companion thought not. 
I was reminded of a bird of the same 
kind that I had seen a few days before 
cross a deep gully perhaps twenty feet 
in width. “ He seemed to slide across, ” 
said the man who was with me. That 
was exactly the word. He did not lift 
a wing, as far as we noticed, nor rise 
so much as an inch into the air, but as 
it were stepped from one bank to the 
other. So this second bird went up the 
mountain side almost without our seeing 
how he did it. A few steps, and he 
was there, as by the exercise of some 
special gift of specific levity. He did 
not fly; and yet it might have “ seemed 
he flew, the way so easy was.” Take 
him how you will, the road-runner’s 
looks do not belie him: he is an odd 
one; and never odder, I should guess, 
than when he stands upon a mountain- 
top and with lowered head pours out 
his amorous soul in coos as gentle as a 
sucking dove’s. I count myself happy 
to have witnessed the moving spectacle. 
I am running into superlatives, but 
no matter. The feeling against their 
use is largely prejudice. Let me suit 
myself with one or two more, therefore, 
and say that the rarest and most excit¬ 
ing bird seen by me in Arizona was a 
painted redstart, Setophaga picta. It 
was at the base of Tucson Mountain, 
close by the canyon wrens’ old mill. 
The vermilion flycatcher, rare as I con¬ 
sidered it at first, became after a while 
almost excessively common. I believe 
it is no exaggeration to say that forty 
or fifty pairs must have been living in 
and about Tucson before the first of 
April. Unless you were out upon the 
desert, you could hardly turn round 
without seeing or hearing them. But 
there was no danger of the painted red¬ 
start’s cheapening itself after this fash¬ 
ion. I saw it twice, for perhaps ten 
minutes in all, and as long as I live I 
shall be thankful for the sight. 
I was playing the spy upon a pair of 
what I took to be Arkansas goldfinches, 
