filled the flowers with sweetened water by means of a 
- medicine dropper, and the visitors attacked the new food as 
eagerly as the usual offering of the blossoms. 
Not until the visit of Columbus to the ‘Western 
World did white men know about these sparkling creatures. 
Europe may well boast of her skylarks and nightingales but 
she misses some joy in not having even one species of 
America’s five hundred kinds of hummingbirds. To be sure, 
most of the kinds of these gems of bird-land live south of the 
United States, and the country east of the one hundred and © 
eightieth meridian can show but the Ruby-throated - 
- Hummingbird, but the western lands of North America have 
eighteen varieties. 
Four of these kinds pass over - the sunny valleys’ and 
the golden poppy fields of California to the Northwest, 
although the Rufous Hummingbird is the only common 
summer resident. The Black-chinned Hummingbird, which 
may be recognized by his velvety black front ruff, belongs 
to the same species as the Eastern bird, and wanders some- 
_ times into the Inland Empire anywhere from the Rocky 
Mountains to the Pacific, where he indulges in the regular — 
fashions of his sort, except that he makes a nest which 
looks more like a sponge than an ordinary egg basket. 
An ambitious mountaineer on a summer trip to the . 
white country, while within the limit of trees, may see the 
smallest male of one of these birds which loves the same 
regions as the climber. The radiating rose-purple color of — 
his throat is the mark of a Calliope Hummingbird, and 
Dawson says it is common on the Cascade Divide. 
A fourth variety, the Allen Hummingbird, looks so 
much like the female Rufous, except that he has a blazing 
- breastplate, that even an expert measures the toes and tail 
feathers before he is absolutely sure which bird he holds 
in his hand, and lays away in a collection of dried, dead 
skins. In several of the tragedies, which usually ends the 
life of these birds, the Allen Hummer has been identified, 
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