That the Yellow Rail winters with us, at least upon the marshes trib¬ 
utary to San Francisco Bay, there can be no doubt. It is almost equally 
certain that the bird does not breed in the State, nor indeed anywhere west 
of the Rocky 
Mountains. It is 
rather one of those 
species which, like 
the Marbled God- 
wit, nests in the 
Dakotas and the 
northern interior 
generally and comes 
west, as well as 
south to California, 
to spend a restful 
winter. There are 
two records for 
southern California 
based on specimens, 
and one sight record 
for Santa Barbara 1 
in which I do not 
myself place im¬ 
plicit confidence. 
‘‘The heavy 
snows of the past 
winter, the deepest in decades, convinced us that there was no need for 
haste. So as we skirted, on the 6th day of June, the eastern bases of the 
Sierra Nevada Mountains en route to Mammoth Camp, we accepted the 
challenge of a Yellow-headed Blackbird sounding from a wayside swamp 
and deployed for investigation. The place was Tong Valley, a well- 
watered plateau in southern Mono County, and the altitude was some¬ 
thing over 7000 feet. I had passed the swamp unheeding a dozen times 
before, in previous seasons; but one of my assistants, Lawrence Stevens, 
had never seen a Yellow-head’s nest, and was curious. A broad stretch 
of shallow water, say quarter of a mile wide and a mile long, is here fed 
by mountain springs, and bears a complete investiture of rank grasses or 
dwarf sedges, save where, centrally, it supports low' beds of tides, or irrupts 
in pools so charged with mineral content that vegetation will not grow. 
Cattle tramp the edges in droves, but apparently avoid the central portion 
of the swamp because of its treacherous nature. 
Taken in North Dakota Photo by Rev. P. B. Peabody 
n/8 YELLOW RAIL, IN SITU 
INVESTING GRASSES PARTED 
The Yellow Rail 
1 Dec. 26, 1914. Reported in Bird-Lore, Vol. XVII., Jan.-Feb., 1915, p. 47. 
