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OFFICIAL ORGAN OF THE WISCONSIN, ILLINOIS AND ICHIGAN AUDUBON 
SOCIETIES 
One Year 25 Cents 
Single Copy 5 Cents 
Published by the Wisconsin Audubon Society at Madison, Wisconsin 
Entered as second class matter August 23, 1909, at Madison, Wis., under the act of Congress of March 3. 1879 
VOL,. XIII. OCTOBER, 1911 NO. 2 
SOME NOTES OF TRAVEL 
By Mrs. Rebecca H. Kauffman 
It was the 24th of December last. We 
haa alighted from the Santa Fe train 
at Albuqurque, New Mexico, and were 
passing through the inner court of the 
Alvarado, the unique and beautiful host- 
tilery of the Santa Fe Railroad, when I 
saw a bird taking its morning bath in 
the basin of the fountain in the center of 
* 
the court. Inasmuch as it had been 
stormy and cold a few days before, ice 
and snow were clinging to the shaded 
side of the basin, but the warm southern 
sun had melted it away on the south side. 
Here the bird was plunging its head un¬ 
der the water and was briskly splashing 
it over itself. It did not look familiar— 
even a well-known bird has a little differ¬ 
ent appearance in another part of the 
country. So I turned to a bright-looking 
small newsboy, dressed in the handsome 
dark blue uniform of the hotel atten- 
; dants, who was going by me and asked 
him what bird it was. Off came his cap, 
“That, Lady,” he answered, “is the 
robin redbreast, and I believe it is the 
only one left. There are many of them 
here, but they all went south before the 
storm, and this one too will go by tomor¬ 
row”. 
Along our line of travel we saw no 
other birds than this one “robin rxl- 
breast” at Albuqurque, except English 
sparrows, until we reached Southern 
California. 
As we passed near a tree sheltered 
spring in the rocks of the foothills of 
Southeastern Colorado, several deer were 
grazing too far away to be disturbed by 
the moving train. One of the trainmen 
told me that from the early morning 
train, travelers could often see as many 
as a hundred deer that had come down 
from the mountains for a drink at the 
spring. During this same day we saw 
innumerable colonies of prairie dogs. 
Some prairie dogs were sitting up by 
their earth works, some running about, 
some nibbling the stubby grass that grew 
sparsely over the sandy rocky soil, some 
playing what seemed to be hide-and-seek 
around the bushy bases of the tall yuc¬ 
cas and thorny cacti; all looked so de¬ 
lightfully happy and so much at home, 
like old fashioned families, parents 
with their many children playing con¬ 
tentedly about them. In hateful con¬ 
trast to this was a coyoto trotting in 
satisfied fullness away from the body of 
a killed heifer. 
But to come back to the birds. At 
first I could not understand why in Jan¬ 
uary there were no more birds to be 
seen in Southern California; those that 
one did see along the roadways, would 
hurry away as the automobile approach¬ 
ed and would quickly dart under the 
shelter of the low bushes, never seeming 
to get far away from the ground branch- 
