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98 THE CONDOR Vol. XIX higher than my head down to the brook and so to a pasture beyond; and along the line of this fragrant fern trail sitting on my camp stool with the bracken closing me in, the tips of the triangular fronds uneurling over my head, I spent many pleasant hours watching the leathered passers-by. Once there came the soft musical, almost tender wick-up, wick-up, wick-up of a Red-shafted Flick- er close beside me, and when the two went by, the if-if-if-if-if was heard. After one of the big birds had flown overhead, a conspicuous object with its red underwings and white rump patch, tt lit on the shadowed side of a hemlock trunk and vanished so completely that I could barely make out the form of its head and neck. The small yellow forms of Lutescent Warblers were often seen during June disappearing in the bushes about the garden and fern field, though the quiet little birds were not so much in evidence as the Golden PileGlared Warb- lers with their keener colors and louder voices. But on the first of July a Lutescent was found feeding young near the fern trail. Twice it almost flew into me, it was so preoccupied. As it went in and out of a small spruce and flew back and forth over the bracken 1 had ample opportunity to notice how well its soft green plumage toned in with the yellow green of the sunlit ferns and spruces. The next day, as one of the white dogs was with me, I created quite a dis- turbanee down the fern trail. For how could anxious parents be expected to distinguish between a white dog and a white eat ? Though the voices of young birds were heard, they were prudently kept out of sight. A female Black- headed Grosbeak--with her yellowish brown breast and the white median crown stripe that gives the odd effect of hair parted in the middle--flew onto the tip of a young hemlock and said ick at us, but she did not seem greatly disturbed and when her mate came he took us even less seriously, after intelli- gent inspection beginning to sing. But the white dog marked us for suspicious characters and a Seattle Wren came peering down at us, three black-capped. Pileolated Warblers looked enquiringly as they flipped through the bushes, a Russet-backed Thrush and a 'Song Sparrow examined us, and a Rufous Hum- mer glanced down as he wbizzed by. Though there'was no telling how many Pileolated Warblers and Russet- backed Thrushes there were in the compressed fifty-rod nesting area, the Gros- beaks were apparently the third pair in the immediate neighborhood. Farther down the fern trail my attention was attracted by a Swallow note and looking up, perched jauntily on top of an old gray stub was a rufous-baeked Sparrow Hawk, around whom, for reasons best known to themselves, two White-bellied Swallows, perhaps my friends from the nest in the stub, were elamorously fly- ing. II. TYIE BAND-TAILS Near the foot of the fern trail one day I stopped to enjoy the view of Miami Notch with its purple background, and to look up at a row of noble old hewnlocks and Sitka spruces fronting the strip of timber between the clearing and the Bay, in which as it proved a flock of perhaps fifty of the large Band- tailed Pigeons made their headquarters. Studying the line of tall trees, their large trunks sun-patched, their branches waving in the afternoon sea breeze, two stood out conspicuously, one a great clean boled spruce with big cushions of moss on its branches, the other a bare-tipped lofty mast, good for passing