HUMMINGBIRDS: BROAD-TAILED HUMMINGBIRD 361 
buzzing about the yellow gooseberry bushes where they were feeding. 
Besides their squeaky little song they gave some small staccato notes. 
“A rather faint, muffled staccato note,” Mr. Woods says, “is uttered 
twice in quick succession at the lowest point of its vertically diving 
nuptial flight” (1927, p. 315). We saw the Broad-tails occasionally 
giving this flight the second week in July, darting up into the air and 
then shooting down again in true hummingbird form. Even the 
females, Major Bendire says, indulge in this display of surpassing wing 
power and exuberant vitality. 
Migrating Broad-tails were heard by us on the edge of Espanola 
August 19, 1906, met with on the lower edge of the yellow pines of Santa 
Clara Canyon the next day, and found to be common along Santa 
Clara Creek to its head, on September 4. Two of their favorite feed¬ 
ing flowers, which give warm touches of color to the mountain meadows, 
the red gilia and pentstemon, were still in bloom. The birds showed 
their characteristic fondness for red, being attracted by anything of 
that color in camp. They were particularly abundant in the yellow 
pines, their machine-like rattle being frequently heard through the 
day. While there was a large number of noisy males, there was a still 
larger number of silent females and young, a few small enough to sug¬ 
gest calliope. 
The Hummers were especially numerous at 8,000 feet along Santa 
Clara Creek and on the south pine slope just above it. I was puzzled 
at first to know what they found in the trees bordering the creek but, 
on August 25, being attracted by a brilliantly gorgetted male driving 
off an uncolored hummer, I saw him proceed to circle around a birch 
trunk banded by sapsucker holes. There were no insects visible at 
the holes at that time, but they were full of insect-attracting sap. 
The Red-naped Sapsucker was found among these same birches, 
suggesting that it had made the holes, though the Rocky Mountain 
Sapsucker was seen at the same level. The pink Cleome and a yellow 
composite were the two most abundant flowers in the bottom of the 
canyon at the time, and a. Hummer was seen buzzing up to one of the 
pink Cleomes. At our 8,500-foot camp I saw a Hummingbird feeding 
from a dark purple aster. The throat of one taken was full of honey 
and gnats, explaining the use of the hummingbird tongue, cleft for 
about three quarters of an inch. 
Near the head of the Red River, at 10,700 feet on August 17, I 
saw a female platycercus repeatedly light on a branch back of our tent, 
but it was so cold and wet in the canyon that I supposed she was 
trying to warm herself in the morning sun. In the afternoon, when 
going for dry under-twigs to encourage the camp fire, on a spruce 
branch only about four feet from the ground near the tent, I was 
amazed to find her nest, containing two big young. When I stood 
