only by accident. Two nests were collected on Santa Cruz and one on San Miguel Islands. They were located by flushing the bird from the nest. In every case the nest was nearly stepped on before the bird flew and in each case it was placed in a small bunch of grass in a slight hollow and was right on the feeding ground. I found the towhee (Pipilo maculatus oregonus) not very wild and secured without much trouble a dozen or so. Among those taken was a partial albino having many white feathers scattered among the black on the head and neck.
In a deep, rugged canon some distance inland I found an ideal nesting place for the Dusky Warblers,—a cool stream of water with thickets of green bushes and tangled vines on both sides. Warblers were seen here but no nests were found. A Flicker's nest was seen in a tall dead tree in the bottom of the canon and farther down this canon I found the Santa Cruz Jays nesting. I saw and collected in two or three different canons near the ocean specimens of the song sparrow (M. f. graminea). Four or five raven's nests were found, one containing four eggs. The others had young in various stages of growth. The nests were in holes among the rocks and cliffs in steep gulches, with but one exception. This was placed in an overhanging cliff, twenty feet from the top and high above the ocean, and contained four young on the 8th of May. R. H. Beck.
Breeding of the Dusky Horned Lark in Eastern Washington.
OF the birds I met on a trip through the state of Washington, none were more common than the Dusky Horned Lark (Otocoris alpestris merrilli). About 25 miles west of Walla Walla one reaches what is known as "Eureka Flats," a large space of territory which a few years since was covered with sage brush and bunch grass, but now all that is tillable is in grain and the steep hillsides are pastured. It is the custom among the farmers of this district to summer-fallow one half the land each year and it was in one of these fields that I found this lark nesting.
I spent some time in a field of 160 acres, and in this field and along a road near by, I saw hundreds of the birds daily. There is no water in the district and the farmers haul it from a river and place it in cisterns. From the cisterns water is drawn for the horses, and this is the only place where the birds can obtain a drink, and it is a common sight to see numbers of them about the cistern on a hot day. The birds often remained for hours about the house or barn, for these furnished about all the shade there was on some of the farms.
I had been on the farm a few days when one bright morning at sunrise I heard birds singing which I thought were goldfinches, but on going outside no birds but the larks were about and I soon discovered that they were the songsters. I heard them often after that and would imagine that I was in California listening to the goldfinch, for it seemed strange to find a song bird in such a desolate, sandy country: Out in the summer-fallowed fields hundreds of Horned Larks were to be found, and it was a curious habit of the male to fly up into the air and by a series of circles mount higher and higher 'till it was lost to sight, although one could hear its note which was uttered every few seconds.
Scattered through the fields are numerous plants called "Chinese lettuce" and a species of lupine and under these the birds find a nesting place. A small hollow is scraped out and filled with pieces of wheat straw and dry lupine, with fine pieces of the latter for a lining. The eggs are three or four in number and vary considerably. When the set is incomplete or contains fresh eggs the bird often leaves the nest before you are near, but when the eggs are highly incubated the female sets close and remains near when disturbed. As the farmers have the weeds cut each year in the months of June or July, many nests are annually destroyed. Two or more sets are probably laid in a season as I saw large young in June and fresh eggs late in July.
