344 
BIRDS OF NEW MEXICO 
summer. They are most numerous in migration during August and have nearly all 
left by the end of September. One was seen at Roswell September 16, 1902 (Gaut); 
one September 18 near Burley (Hollister); one September 23, 1904, at Horse Lake 
(Bailey); and two on October 6, 1902, at Santa Rosa (Gaut). 
On the return journey in the spring they are among the very latest migrants, 
seldom reaching northern New Mexico before May 10.—W. W. Cooke. 
Eggs. —Laid on the ground, 2, creamy, olive-buff, or gray, profusely blotched or 
finely speckled with blackish, brownish gray, or lavender. 
Food. —Ants in large proportion and also beetles which are the adult forms of 
noted pests. Specimens taken at Fort Stanton—caddice flies and gnats, together 
with injurious insects, including ants, plant bugs, leaf hoppers, crane flies, click 
beetles, wood-boring and engraver beetles, clover root weevils, and nut weevils. 
General Habits. —At Roswell, Mr. Ligon has often seen the 
Western Nighthawks sitting on fence posts and occasionally on the 
wires. During a month which we spent in the plains country between 
Santa Rosa and Mesa del Agua de la Yegua, the interestingly indi¬ 
vidual bird was one of the companions of our way, sometimes roused 
from its midday nap on the ground or a fence post, where it looked like 
a gray stick, to fly up and give its characteristic sharp peent and its 
raucous pe-auk f on the wing. When we were in camp, it was often 
heard booming in the daytime, the white crescent showing on its long 
pointed wings as it performed its surprising aerial maneuvers. As 
Major Goldman said of those he found in the Zuni Mountains, “before 
dark they fly rather high in the air, pitching headlong occasionally 
and making the noise which has led the Mexicans to call them ‘zum- 
badores , or boomers” (MS). These “rapid headlong plunges,” Doctor 
Townsend, in his interesting paper on Courtship in Birds (1920, pp. 
380-393), classes as a form of dance, accompanied by the musical 
booming of the air rushing through the wing feathers. This booming, 
Doctor Wetmore writes, is attributed by some to a hole which the male 
is supposed to have in each wing and which he opens as he rushes 
through the air, so producing the loud whirring boom. After dark 
the Nighthawks fly closer over the ground, which probably accounts 
for the grasshoppers found in their stomachs. 
These long-winged birds, Mr. W. L. McAtee says, are “so expert in 
flight that no insects can escape them. They sweep up in their 
capacious mouths everything from the largest moths and dragon flies 
to the tiniest ants and gnats, and in this way sometimes gather most 
remarkable collections of insects. Several stomachs have contained 
fifty or more different kinds and the number of individuals may run 
into the thousands” (Beal, McAtee, and Kalmbach, 1918—1927 ed., 
p. 36). But many are needed by a growing family of even two young. 
Our first discovery of a nesting bird was not until June 24, and 
then on top of a three-hundred-foot butte facing the pine-clad Mesa 
Yegua. Here, on a stony flat, we flushed the parent and on hunting 
