. The condor. Birds; Birds; Birds. May, 1921 NESTING OF THE STEPHENS FOX SPARROW- SI the ground. We also surmised that probably they were close sitters or else left the nest long before the collector approached near, or that perhaps they nested much earlier in the spring than the time when we were able to go to their nesting grounds. The spring of 1919, two fellow Club members, Gordon Nicholson, of Up- land, and S. Rich, of Claremont, accompanied me to Big Bear on May 30, wish- ing, but I must say not very hopefully, that we would find the nest of the Ste- phens Fox Sparrow. Anyway we would al
. The condor. Birds; Birds; Birds. May, 1921 NESTING OF THE STEPHENS FOX SPARROW- SI the ground. We also surmised that probably they were close sitters or else left the nest long before the collector approached near, or that perhaps they nested much earlier in the spring than the time when we were able to go to their nesting grounds. The spring of 1919, two fellow Club members, Gordon Nicholson, of Up- land, and S. Rich, of Claremont, accompanied me to Big Bear on May 30, wish- ing, but I must say not very hopefully, that we would find the nest of the Ste- phens Fox Sparrow. Anyway we would almost certainly find such nests as the Wright Flycatcher and Green-tailed Towhee in our hunting, so that our work would not be without some results. On the afternoon of May 31 we started to prospect carefully through a likely looking patch of mountain misery, oftentimes called buckthorn, near the lake shore; and to prospect means to examine every bush carefully. Stephens Fox- Sparrows and Green-tailed Towhees were singing, Wright Flycatchers twitter-. Fig. 16. Stephens Fox Sparrow approaching nest; Big Bear Lake, San Bernardino Mountains. ing, Calliope Hummingbirds darting here and there, with an occasional Ashy Kinglet and many Audubon Warblers busy in the pines above us. We had not gone far until we kicked out a rather young fox sparrow from the brush, and then another. The parents were near at hand and played the broken-wing trick- to perfection in their attempts to coax us away, all the while uttering their me- tallic "chip". A little farther on, while I was examining a nest of the Wright Flycatcher, Nicholson shouted, "I have a Stephens on a nest": so to him goes the credit of our first nest. This was three feet up in a crotch of a buckthorn bush. One of the parents was sitting; in fact the bird sat so close that she (it may have been the male) did not flush until I was about a foot from her The nest contained one fresh egg, which we left, hoping for a c
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