tomatic toy wound up for the
performance. When tired, the flicker hopped up on a branch and vented
its feelings by shouting _if-if-if-if-if-if-if_, after which it quietly
returned to work. The wood was so soft that the excavating made almost
no noise, but it was easy to see what was going on, for the carpenter
simply drew back its head and tossed out the glistening chips for all
the world to see. At the end of a week the flicker was working so far
down in its excavation that only the tip of its tail stuck out of the
door.

The nest of another Colaptes, I found by accident--a fresh chip dropped
from mid-air upon my riding skirt. Just then Canello gave a stentorian
sneeze and the bird came to her window to look down. She did not object
to us, and was loath to turn back inside the dark hole--such a close
stuffy place--when outside there were the rich green leaves of the tree,
the sweet breath of the hayfield and the gentle breeze just springing
up; all the warmth and sunshine and fragrance of the fields. How could
she ever leave to go below? Perhaps she bethought her that soon the dark
hole would be a home ringing with the voices of her little ones; at all
events, she quickly turned and disappeared in her nest.

At the foot of the ranch I discovered a comical, sleepy little brown
owl, dozing in a sycamore window. When we waked it up, it went backing
down the hole. I wondered if it kept awake all day without food, for
surely owl children do not get many meals by daylight. I spoke to the
ranchman's son about it, and he said he thought the old birds fed the
young too much, that he had found about a dozen small kangaroo rats and
mice in their holes! He told me that he had known old owls to change
places in the daytime, and both birds to stay in the hole during the
day. Down the valley, where an old well was only partly covered over, at
different times he had found a number of drowned owls. They seemed to
fly into any dark hole that offered. Three barn owls had been taken from
a windmill tank in the neighborhood in about a month. In a mine at
Escondido the man had found a number of owls sitting in a crevice where
the earth, had caved; and he had seen about a dozen of them fifty to a
hundred feet underground, at the bottom of the mine shaft.

I did not wonder the birds wanted to keep out of sight in the daytime,
knowing what happened to those that stayed out. A pair nested in the top
of a high sycamore on my neighbors' premise