Mar., 1911 THE OASIS O?' THE LLANO 45 Remains of a crawfish and a.land turtle were probably attributable to a coon, while skunk tracks added their testimony as to the popularity of this eagle market. Bits of white bone had been carried away by aesthetic wood rats to decorate their nests in the junipers. The raven's nest was evidently an ancestra? home, as bushels of old sticks had been thrown down on the ground. It might well have been used for generations, for it was quite inaccessible, about half way up a fifty-foot sandstone wall in a niche under a projecting rock. The old pair, Mr. Bailey reported "croak- ing and diving and gyrating along the face of the cliff, flying up to the top of the cliff, tilting up; closing their wings, and diving deep iuto the valley; then np again; then off across the face of the cliff." in another place where two Ravens were seen sailing across the.face of the wall, a t-hird, when closely watched proKed only a projected shadow--like many of the supposedly dark re?litie? of life. The Buzzards seen flying around the wall were traced to the old carcass of a sheep. A faint trail led away from the carcass, and a coyote surprised there by the hunters burst out howling so loud that our camp man who was cutting tent pins dropped his saw and ran for his rifle. On investigation the cause of the coyote's excited outburst was explained by the discovery of a den containing young m?der the rocks not far away. From Mesa Pajarito we followed along the north wall of the Llano till we came to a headland bluff rising 1000 feet from the plain, shown by the contour map to be the highest point of the Staked Plains. On camping.at its foot we could hardly wait to explore the neighborhood, to see what new riches we should find in this. green belt betweeu the upper and lower brown plains; for the walls of the Llano were here six hundred feet bigher than at the Pajarito amphitheater and pro?nised a correspondingly richer flora and fauna at their base. Our first ornithological dis- covery had been made when driving into camp, for we were greeted by the loud notes of the Quaker-like Gray Vireo, a bird particularly interesting to find because of its restricted range'it? the southwest; and afterwards its cheery though jerky song was not only cot?stantly in our ears in camp but often heard among the juni- pers. Another bird we were delighted to find at our door was the Scott Oriole, that rare musician with exquisite plumage of lemon and black, consistently follow- ing OUt a narrow strip of its native Lower Sonoran mesquite though surrounded by Upper Sonoran junipers and nut pines. A pair of the birds was doubtless nesting near us, but they were so shy they would fly on and on through the junipers wl?en followed. The song of the male, an immature male, suggested the meadowlark's song. His favorite phrase from his rich repertoire heard from camp throughout the day was so curiously accented on the second and fifth syllables that as we went and came through the junipers with it iSnging in our ears it phrased itself appro- priately--a ju'-ni-per val'-ley, a ju'-ni-per val'-ley, a ju'-ni-per val?-ley. The first night our list of neighborhood discoveries was swelled by a young family of Baird Wrens just being put to roost--how joyfully the' head of the family did sing!--and a Mockingbird with a nest and three handsome blue' eggs, a per- sistent mocker who, as my notes complain, "kept at something morning, noon, and
night." N. ot to be forgotten were the Nighthawks', though they had been boom-
ing in the day time about our camps during the entire month since we entered the field. The next day on a horseback trip when passing through a narrow .juniper gulch we found a Black-headed Grosbeak sitting on her nest in 'a hackberry, an Arkansas Kingbird building in a pocket of a charred juniper stump, and best of all a Gray Vireo brooding her eggs so faithfully that she let me stroke her head on the nest--nothing remarkable for a vireo to be sure, but a heart-warming experience
