THE AUSTRALIAN NATURALIST. 163 
Sacramento, and further north one species is often nearly as 
bad as our rabbits in the wheat fields. Coming into the 
garden one afternoon a curious little thing flashed past me 
among the shrubs. Was it a moth or a bird? And then it 
darted up and I saw my first humming bird. I had seen 
hundreds of stuffed humming birds; the great Gould collec- 
tion in the British Museum; but this was a revelation. There 
were many later on among the flowers, not the brilliantly 
tinted forms of tropical America, for as you know, this group 
ranges from the United States down to the barren rocks of 
Terra del Fuego. I saw many different humming birds after- 
wards in Mexico, and the West Indies, where when sitting 
on a flower-covered verandah they would be so intent on 
sucking up the honey that they would hover over a flower 
within a few inches of one’s head; but I never forgot my first 
humming bird. They are very noisy, pugnacious little atoms, 
always challenging or scolding as they flit about among the 
flowers, or dart straight upward as they often do when 
alarmed. The Island of Trinidad is called the ‘‘Home of 
the Humming Birds’? from the numbers found there, but as 
yellow fever had broken out a few days before we called 
there, no one was allowed to land. 
At Watsonville I had a long day’s drive through the 
Pajaro Valley, once a great redwood forest, now transformed 
into apple orchards. I saw many birds along the road, 
among them great flocks of blackbirds; one species had a 
bright red patch on each wing. At a little village in an oak 
forest near Santa Rosa, all the scrub oaks were covered with 
smooth brown cynips galls as large and round as an ordin- 
ary apple, and I was interested in watching the large grey 
woodpecker drilling holes in them, and obtaining the little 
fat grubs in the centre. IT might here note the two charac- 
teristic groups of oaks that aré found in California: the 
“live oaks,’ as the evergreen oaks that do,not shed their 
leaves are termed, and the other deciduous species that are 
the most abundant. When at Los Angelos in Southern Cali- 
fornia I spent a Sunday on Mount Lowe at an elevation of 
about 6000 feet; in the oak and pine forests surrounding the 
hotel were dozens of large grey squirrels (Sczurus 
carolinensis), and so tame that they would run up and feed 
out of your hand. I found them just as friendly later on in 
the park round the Agricultural Department in Washing- 
ton, where they are protected. 
I did not have much time for collecting specimens, but one 
Sunday had a delightful day in the woods of Virginia under 
the guidance of Messrs. Candell and Knab, of the National 
Museum. One of the most striking things besides the won- 
