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116 THE CONDOR Vol. XIV with the sunlit branch below, that the only wonder was that tolmiei had ever been separated from his background. For it was he, the lovely little Macgillivray Warbler, an old friend of the Sierra and close relative of philadelphia, the mourner of the east: a most charming bird, when he sat on a branch in the sun and threw up his head to sing his rich finch-like song. A few days later under the cottonwoods in a dense tangle of wild plum, wild rose, maple, and poison ivy, tohniei was encountered in a still more attractive role. The absorbed musician was now the anxious guardian of the nest. He and his mate with food in their bills circled around the intruder chipping and switching their tails noncom- mittally. When they passed through a patch of sunlight the green on their backs warmed tip prettily, and when the female went to a distance the white spots on her eyelids proved a good mark for an intimate friend to follow. And--there was the nest! Only about a foot above the ground in a small bush overgrown with clematis the pretty cup held four precious but undeniably plain nestlings with fuzzy heads and yellow bills. In wandering about the grove we sometimes met a secretive pair of birds with a suggestive billful flying swiftly where we could not follow, or found a feathered parent trying to get its unduly trustful young out of our path--among them, robins, wrens, and towhees--and one day--beside the road outside the grove--we were stopped by the pitiful cries of a pair of Catbirds whose last young one had just been killed. Its little headless body was lying in the nest bearing mute testimony to the horrid act of some pitiless prowler. Eastern Cat- birds seemed singularly out of place here, among Macgillivray Warblers, Audubol? Thrushes, Black-headed Grosbeaks, Mountain Bluebirds, Violet-green Swallows, and other westerners, but they were near the limit of their southwestern range. Near the edge of the grove a Red-naped Sapsucker whose family were out of the nest was seen a number of times flying from a stub diagonally to the ground where, on investigation, there proved to be a colony of ants. Outside the grove the arid sagebrush flat dotted with pifiol? pine and juniper marked off by the water line of the creek and its irrigation ditches offered con- genial homes for the Woodhouse Jay and the green towhee; and a stealthy brood- ing green towhee with rufous crown and white chin much to our delight was caught slipping froin her nest in a clematis-clad sagebush near the ground. About the clumps of red gilia bordering-the woods, Broad-tailed Hummingbirds whizzed noisily, darting off with such lightning speed that they were not followed home. Coldfinches often passed over, and one party consisting of a male and several females flew down to a cliff rose and the male began tweaking out the long-tailed carpels of cercocarpus. From the sagebrush we looked up over the foothills to the timbered moun- tains above, the old hunting grounds of the Taos Indians, and from the ridges and the canyons in the evenings came the familiar peent of nighthawks, and that most deliciously soothing note of western twilights, poor-will, poor-will, poor- will, poor-will-loz?.