2 | THE - AU. D*U/B-OIN UVB UL ei ee 
sandy back yard. She said they were called “No Hopes” because that was 
what they were always saying. It was a week or two before I could get 
books, very inadequate ones, from the city library and decide they were 
Inca doves. About my house I first saw a number of other birds. The 
Gila woodpecker was common. In a neglected cactus garden at the rear of 
my lot was a thrasher with a lovely song, the Palmer’s thrasher. One day 
I noticed a great excitement just outside of my kitchen window. There was 
an eruption of flying white ants and flocks of small birds were busily 
gorging themselves. They were Audubon’s warblers, something like our 
myrtles, but were duller in color. Had I known more about white ants as 
termites I might have been more concerned about the stability of the 
foundations of my house than about the identification of the warblers. 
There were a number of other birds that I associate with the town 
itself. The cactus wren I could always find in the cactus garden of the 
University of Arizona. The cactus woodpecker I can still see going up the 
palm tree by the city library. The green-backed goldfinch was in a tiny 
park on my way to church, and the black phoebe I saw while sitting on a 
stone wall west of town. One evening I went out into my back yard and 
saw, I thought, a flock of old friends that had just come in, white-crowned 
sparrows; but upon closer study I found they were Gambel’s sparrows. My 
most vivid memory is of the hundreds of them that went to bed each evening 
in the olive trees just west of the library of the University, where I used 
often to go in the late afternoon to read, to watch the sunset and to walk 
home under the olives, listening to the Gambel’s singing their vesper chorus. 
It was my great good fortune to have taken a furnished house adjoining 
the home of Dr. and Mrs. Vorhies. Dr. Vorhies was, I think, the professor 
of entomology at the University, but he was also a bird student and was 
head of a Nature Club that twice a month made trips to interesting points 
in the country round about. When they found I was wanting to learn as 
much of the bird life of the locality as possible they not only asked me to 
join the Club but took me with them in their car on numerous trips. These 
trips were not primarily for birds, but I always learned a few new ones 
each time. At Picacho, which is a large artificial lake, were a dozen or so 
great white pelicans overhead. At Casa Grande I recall the pair of western 
horned owls in the shed over the ruins; also the Say’s phoebe that sat on 
one of the beams projecting outside. On the way to Casa Grande I saw my 
first road-runners. A pair stopped by the road quite near the car and were 
just as queer looking as I had hoped they would be. On the same trip the 
car flushed a flock of lark buntings. 
But by far the best remembered trip was the one to the mountain, 
Baboquivari. The object was to climb this peak which until recently only 
a very few people had been able to scale. We had to start early, about 
7:30 A.M., for there was an eighty mile drive through the desert, much of 
it with no apparent road. An unusually large number of people, about 
forty, made up the party. Our first stop was at the small Papago Indian 
village of Sells. We all got out of the cars and spent half an hour or so 
getting acquainted. Here I saw my first Gambel’s quail, a whole cage full 
of them. All who remember the quail of Disney’s Bambi will know how 
