WARBLERS: PAINTED REDSTART 
635 
Nest. —On the ground, preferably on a bank or hillside, usually beneath a pro¬ 
jecting rock or bunch of grass; large, flat, and shallow, made of bark and coarse weed 
fibers, lined with fine grasses and a few hairs. Eggs: Usually 4, white, wreathed 
around the larger end with reddish brown and lavender-gray, with a few scattering 
dots. 
General Habits. —The handsome tricolored Painted Redstart is 
often found near waterfalls, in damp, shady canyons, during the nesting 
season; where, as Mi*. Swarth says, “with wings and tail outspread, 
and feathers puffed out to show their beauties to the best advantage, he 
can be seen clambering over tree trunks or mossy rocks” (1904, p. 57). 
One that Mr. Bailey found near his camp in the Mimbres Moun¬ 
tains, in the nesting season, as he wrote admiringly—“a beautiful 
Painted Redstart was taking a bath in the Mimbres River near its 
head,” and he adds, “its white wing and tail patches were as con¬ 
spicuous as its red throat and black coat” (MS). 
Those seen by Major Goldman in the Burro Mountains in the fall 
were found “among the oaks and pines on the northeast slope from 
7,000 feet to the summit. One was working over the face of a cliff, its 
location and motions suggesting those of a Canyon Wren” (MS). 
At the foot of the Santa Rita Mountains in Arizona, when watching 
the spring migration and greeting old friends of the field, which brought 
us pleasant reminiscences of California and New Mexico, there suddenly 
appeared a new and wonderful bird to me, this spectacular, theatrical 
Painted Redstart, which comes up from Central America just far 
enough to reach the mountains of Arizona and New Mexico. Although 
three were the most we ever saw at a time, as I wrote, “one was enough 
to set agog both camp and ranch. Its black plumage, which in the 
sun had the exquisite silken sheen of that of the Phainopeplas might 
well have been given its strikingly contrasted snowy wing patches and 
outside tail feathers as well as the appropriately rich carmine breast, 
by the careful hand of an artist deliberately painting a feathered 
masterpiece. What matter if the artist were Mother Nature working 
through long ages to produce masterpieces which should stand the 
test of time, in which plume and habit of life were so harmoniously 
adjusted that the race could not fail to be perpetuated. As if actually 
conscious that its protecting blackness would effectually hide it in 
the dense shadowy oak tops and as if knowing that at all hazards it 
must not be lost from its kind, it fairly flaunted its white plumes, going 
about with wings drooping to display their white patches and its long 
fan tail widely spread to exhibit the open shears of white. The white 
of the eyelid might also have had its use when two met in the shadows, 
but it seemed a trivial detail Nature had added gratuitously. Suppose 
the manner of carrying the wings and tail were best suited to effect 
sudden Flycatcher-like sallies after insects—is it then unusual for 
