. Birds of California; an introduction to more than three hundred common birds of the state and adjacent islands, with a supplementary list of rare migrants, accidental visitants, and hypothetical subspecies . morning, and oftentimesthey alone break the death-like hush of evening. TheLeconte thrasher runs him a close face in this, but, Ibelieve, is always a little short of winning. A spiritbrave enough to sing in all the dreary waste and scorch-ing heat wins your honest admiration, and you try toimagine what the parched and silent desert would bewithout these two birds. In places it seems as i
. Birds of California; an introduction to more than three hundred common birds of the state and adjacent islands, with a supplementary list of rare migrants, accidental visitants, and hypothetical subspecies . morning, and oftentimesthey alone break the death-like hush of evening. TheLeconte thrasher runs him a close face in this, but, Ibelieve, is always a little short of winning. A spiritbrave enough to sing in all the dreary waste and scorch-ing heat wins your honest admiration, and you try toimagine what the parched and silent desert would bewithout these two birds. In places it seems as if every other cactus contained anest of this species, so common is it. A long, purse-shaped affair, it is laid flat in the fork of a cactus andhaving a doorway at the small end whereby the busybrown mother may enter. Another wren-like trait of this 278 LAND BIRDS bird is the building of dummy nests. I can find no au-thority for this statement other than my own observation,but am positive investigation will prove it to be male sometimes, if not invariably, sleeps in one ofthese dummies. By cutting a slit in the robf of a nest containingyoung, it was possible to watch the brood develop. ■r^vci. 713. Cactus long, purse-shaped affair. This slit was closed and fastened after each examina-tion. At first they were the usual naked, pinkish nest-lings, with a sparse sprinkling of whitish down on crownand back, but they soon took on the soft brown andwhite plumage of young wrens, and were remarkably en-terprising. While very young they were fed by regurgi-tation, but on the fifth day, when their eyes had opened,the parents carried insects in their beaks when they entered WITH BROWN PREDOMINATING 279 the nest, and then the crops of the young plainly indicateda stronger diet. By regurgitation in a case like this, Imean that the adults masticated the food and carried itin their own gular pouch, or crop, to the young. Duringthe last few days that the young Wrens spent in t
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Keywords: ., bookauthorwhee, bookcentury1900, bookdecade1910, booksubjectbirds
