202 THE CONDOK Vol. XI positive evidence as we have, points solely to the smaller .rodents as their source of food supply. Unquestionably, they are an exceedingly beneficial raptor, though their rarity would, of course, impair their collective usefulness. As I hung there, studying at first hand the nest of a Spotted 0wl, there came a last evidence of the bird's mild stupidity. Suddenly the shadow of her broad, silent wings fell across me, and I instinctively cringed. While I still clung to the nesting ledge with one hand, and to her protesting young with the other, she swept in and alit within eighteen inches of my fingers. _?md yet, so little of menace was in her eye an d pose, that I calmly left my bare hand within striking distance until we were ready to lower away. Surely
the veriest dicky-bird of them all,--so despised of Mr. Dawson in a certain
raptor eulogy,--would do more to avenge the supposed rape of her offspring than did this taloned bird of prey, sitting idly by without apparently the cour- age to protect its young by fight, or the common sense to protect herself by flight. One of the young was left in the nest in the confident hope that it would be safely reared there as soon as our tackle should be removed. The other and larger bird was taken, and is now in my collection. It proved to be a male, and furnishes a good example of the bird in the juvenal down. On our way out the next day, we were delighted to see the' adult bird and her young sitting complacently side by side in the nest as we passed, the old bird content in the quiet possession of her home, the youngster still abob with undiminished curiosity. And thus we left them--to the undying disgust of the dyed-in-the-wool collector of the party--left them to their wilderness of pines and clouds, and wrinkled, fog-filled valleys, thousands of feet below. York Harbor, Maine, July z$, ?9?4. HENRY W. MARSDEN By LOUIS B. BISHOP N FEBRUARY 26, 1914, at Pacific Grove, California, after a short ill- ness with pneumonia, there rested from his labors Henry Warden Mars- den. Known personally to but comparatively few ornithologists and even by name to not very many men out of California, the last fifteen years of his life were devoted almost exclusively to collecting birds; and those of us who possess the results of his work have not only beautiful bird skins but a living memory of an earnest, loyal helper, who spared neither time nor effort that our collections might be enriched with what we needed for scientific study, and no more. For, like all truly interested in birds, he hated to take life needlessly. Writing me from Arizona some years ago he said of the Pyrrhuloxia: "They are too beautiful to kill"; and in his last letter from Pacific Grove, written only a few days before his death, I read: "I have skinned forty Cassin Auk- lets which I found dead along the shore. I don't know what I shall do with them, but I hated to let them spoiL" And this conscientiousness followed him through all his work. His chief fear, fr. equently expressed to me in letters, was that he would send us more than we needed of any species. Things of beauty, as I have said, his bird-skins were, and probably, all things considered, the finest ever made; they could only have been the product of one with both rare talent and love for his work. And both of these he had, as well as interest in other branches of ornithology, though he wrote but little.
