IBISES: WHITE-FACED GLOSSY IBIS 
101 
Nest. —In colonies, sometimes in low bushes but generally in tule marshes, on 
bent-over tules, made of tule stalks and lined with marsh grass. Eggs: Usually 3 
or 4, dark blue, fading to lighter blue during incubation. 
Food. —Largely insects, worms, snails, and other mollusks, crustaceans, especially 
crawfish; small fish, and occasionally frogs. 
General Habits. —The White-faced Glossy Ibis, one of the most 
picturesque and individual birds that enters the United States, is to be 
looked for in New Mexico as a rare possibility during the migrations. 
Our only meeting with him in the State was a most unexpected one. 
On descending from the snowy Mogollon Mountains, in November, 
1906, we made camp at Glenwood, a stage station at about 5,000 feet 
in the San Francisco River Valley, and near by, on the freight road, 
perched on a dooryard fence, to our astonishment we discovered two 
stuffed Glossy Ibises. Inside the house we also found a mounted 
Blue Heron. When the Ibises had been shot and brought in, the 
apologetic taxidermist said, they were so handsome that she wanted to 
save them, and having nothing better had put them up with tobacco 
and camphor gum, making eyes with black buttons and yellow satin! 
In life, the foreign looking birds make unusual pictures. A flock of 
about thirty that we once found near an alkaline lake in southern 
California were “standing around taking their comfort, or walking 
about humped over like curlew, probing with their long decurved bills, 
and at a distance they looked black enough to justify their common 
local name Black Curlew, for we were not near enough to see the irides¬ 
cence that gives them the name, Bronze Curlew. As we approached 
they rose, with a loud quank, quank , and circled about in a close flock 
looking as decorative as figures on a Japanese screen, each bird a segment 
of a circle with its long extended drooping neck and legs. As they 
swung around and the sun struck them, their long necks glowed dark 
maroon and their backs shone dark green. It was a picture for an artist. 
After circling low around us they dropped down in the place from which 
they had arisen, after which they stalked about unconcernedly, probing 
the ground. They must also have been feeding along the lake shore for 
in places the whitish crust of dried algae was as riddled as a long used 
target (1917b, p. 157).” 
At Los Banos, California, where Doctor Chapman and Mr. Fuertes 
found the Ibises so shy that it was difficult to get near enough to hear 
their nasal ooh-ick-ooh-ick as they took wing, the bird men, nevertheless, 
had a most remarkable experience with these strange birds. “ On several 
occasions,” Doctor Chapman says, “we were privileged to see flocks of 
from ten to forty of these usually dignified birds perforin a surprising 
evolution. In close formation, they soared skyward in a broad spiral, 
mounting higher and higher until, in their leisurely and graceful manner, 
they had reached an elevation of at least five hundred feet. Then, 
