2 THE, AUDUBON, BU UL rai 
At the home of Mr. and Mrs. William Foerster and Mrs. Foerster’s son, 
Allan Phillips, there were many House Finches that warbled charmingly, 
a large flock of Robins that sang and bathed, a dozen at a time, in the large 
pool, many Gambel’s Sparrows, and two species that were new to me: the 
Gila Woodpecker with its round red cap and ladder back and the quaint 
little Inca Dove with its pleasant song, ho-ho. 
That first morning Dr. Phillips took me to see the desert. We drove 
past great stretches of creosote bush, Larrea divaricata, “the most common 
and widely distributed shrub in the desert,’* at this time bronze green, but - 
later it would be bright with yellow flowers. It is little frequented by birds 
and mammals, for it is neither rigid nor thorny for shelter and nesting sites, 
nor are its seeds much liked. We hoped to see the rare Rufous-winged 
Sparrow in the Wilmot Road region, but the place was much damaged by 
over-grazing and most of the tabosa grass gone; although we heard the 
sparrows singing in the distance we failed to locate them. The chief tree 
was the desert hackberry, a shrubby, prickly affair with small green leaves; 
wood rat houses were built into the bases of many of them. Mesquite was 
not yet in leaf. I was happy to see for the first time Mexican tea, Ephedra 
trifurcata, a very primitive plant belonging to the Gnetales, with long green 
stems and no leaves. There were many blue palo verdes, small trees with 
green branches, capable of photosynthesis and leafless during most of the 
year; in spring they are covered with masses of yellow flowers. Barrel 
cacti were surprising sights and cholla cactus was abundant; one held two 
Cactus Wren nests, others sheltered wood rat homes, while nearby were 
holes of kangaroo rats. Birds were rather quiet on this warm mid-morn- 
ing; a large Cactus Wren shouted and a Curved-billed Thrasher sang, while 
my first Verdin, a funny little olive-grayish fellow with a yellow head, 
chattered tic tic tic tic; we found two of its large nests with entrance at 
the bottom. ; 
On the way to the San Xavier Indian Reservation we came to stony 
buttes covered with the incredible saguaros or giant cacti; each seemed to 
own a woodpecker hole made by Gilded Flickers and Gila Woodpeckers and 
appropriated by Elf Owls and Purple Martins. Growing on a cat’s claw, 
Acacia Greggit, was the strangest kind of mistletoe, Phoradendron cali- 
fornicum, with no leaves and the tiniest of flowers around which bees were 
humming. Birds were abundant, the most interesting to me being Say’s 
Phoebe with its rusty underparts, chunky Canyon Towhee, \Bendire’s 
Thrasher with its straight bill, and migrating White-throated Swifts that 
dashed hither and yon. 
The next day we accompanied the Tucson Bird Club, led by Dr. Charles 
T. Vorhies, dean of Arizona naturalists, on a trip to irrigated land and 
ranches around the city. Our first stop was at the site of a mesquite forest, 
once a dense woods with trees thirty to sixty feet in height and as much as 
two feet in diameter; now only a few stumps remain. By a little pond we 
*L. Benson and R. A. Darrow, 1944, A Manual of Southwestern Desert Trees 
and Shrubs, Univ. Arizona Bull., Vol. XUV; No. 2. 415 pp: 
