Identifier: americanbirdmaga61906worc (find matches)
Title: American bird magazine, ornithology
Year: 1903 (1900s)
Authors:
Subjects: Birds
Publisher: Worcester, Mass. : C.K. Reed

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ail. Where they came from Ido not know, for it is some six miles back to the oak-lined canyons, wherethese birds are usually found. However, the owner of the lot protected themfrom wandering boys and Sunday hunters, who are the banes of our 18 AMERICAN ORNITHOLOGY. birds, and they made their nest in the rank grass at the base of an old stump,squarely in the middle of the pasture. Here they layed 14 eggs and thephoto shows you the nest on the day the last egg was laid. Sometimes theValley Quail will weave an arch of grass blades over her nest as does theBob-white, but not often, and in this case the ornamentation was entirelyomitted, so that when )\Iother Quail left the nest the eggs were quite ex-posed. Nothing happened to them, however, and all fourteen hatched. Two met an imtimely end, but the remaining twelve and two parentbirds are still to be seen and heard around the place. Probably they will re-main there and two or three pairs of them nest in the surrounding fields nextseason.
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Photo by H. H. Dunn Nest of Valley Partridge. AMERICAN ORNITHOLOGY. 19 Another nest I found a season or two ago, down in the lowlands betweenthis city and the beach contained five snow-white eggs, and was the home ofa Short-eared Owl, quite a rare bird in California. When I found the nestthe old birds were at home—the female on the nest, the male sitting in thetall grass, close by. Unfortunately, someone found the nest shortly afterI did and robbed it of its treasures, for when I went back to photographthe young birds, three weeks later, there was not even a scrap of a brokenshell in the nest and the old birds were gone. This nest was flat on the ground, the eggs merely laid on a mat of marshgrass, with a little rim of broken grass stems around it. I think it was anabandoned nest of some one of the rail tribe, though it may have been madeby the owls themselves. These owls do an immense amount of good for thefarmers of this section and I regret very much the destruction of this onefa

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