362 
BIRDS OF NEW MEXICO 
gazing at them, she came and fed them close by, and later, when 
Mr. Bailey photographed them, she let him come within three feet of 
her. It was so late in the season and already so cold at that altitude 
we were afraid the belated little mother would not be able to get her 
brood down the mountain in time to save them. 
On the Upper Pecos, in the Sangrc de Cristo Mountains in 1883, 
Mr. Henshaw found the Broad-tails extremely numerous up to the first 
of August, when young birds were first noticed, but by the tenth there 
were none, and he concluded that immediately upon the young leaving 
the nest the males, warned of the approach of fall by the frosty nights 
and the decreasing supply of food, abandon their summer limits and at 
once set out for their winter quarters, to be followed not long after by 
the females and young; the young, probably because they have less 
strength, lingering last, being seen even after every adult bird has 
departed (1886, pp. 75-76). This fall migration was met with by Mr. 
Jensen on August 5, 1918, on a five-mile run by automobile in Santa 
Fe County, when he counted a hundred and nineteen Hummingbirds 
resting on telephone wires. 
The Broad-tails are seen not only in the uninhabited mountains 
but occasionally in towns. On the campus of the Santa Fe Indian 
School Mr. Jensen found two pairs nesting in 1921 and 1922; and in 
front of a hotel in Rincon in 1920 Mr. Ligon saw one playing in the 
spray of a lawn sprinkler. An interesting account of one bathing 
in a swift-flowing mountain stream is given by Mr. Jensen in the Auk. 
He says: “On June 7, 1925, I spent the day in Santa Fe Canyon at an 
altitude of 8,500 feet. On crossing the little stream I saw a male 
Broad-tailed Hummingbird —Selasphorus platycercus —flying over the 
stream. I trained my field glasses on the bird and saw it settle down 
in the water with its body nearly half submerged and with the wings 
in motion as in flight. With the water rushing rapidly about the body 
of the bird, it remained stationary. The bird stayed in the water for 
a few seconds, made a short flight and then repeated the performance 
possibly half a dozen times. Sometimes it varied its tactics and with 
wings at rest would alight on a rock over which the water was flowing 
to a depth of one-half inch. I watched the bird about ten minutes, 
then it grew tired of the performance and flew away” (1925b, p. 588). 
Additional Literature.—Wetmore, Alexander, The Migrations of Birds, 
p. 108, 1926. 
RUFOUS HUMMINGBIRD: Selasphorus rufus (Gmelin) 
Plate 36 
Description. — Male: Length about 3.2-3.7 inches, wing 1.5-1.6, tail 1.3, 
bill .6. Female: Length about 3.5-3.9 inches, wing 1.7-1.8, tail 1.2-1.3, bill .6-.7. 
Adults: Wing with outside quill narrow and awl-like, the tip bowed inward ,* tail with 
middle pair of feathers broad, pointed at tip, next to middle pair, strikingly nicked at 
