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 Mar., 1913 NESTING OF THE PRAIRIE FALCON 57 Curse for curse and blow for blow, you jolly old iJirate! Hide your treasures in the remotest cranny of the uttermost wilderness, if you will, and I shall find them; and if I find them, they are mine; and if I reach them, you may wreak your vengeance on whom you will. I will not even reproach you for the rape of pullets nor the carnage of quails. Go to it, old sport! Fill the air with shrieks and call heaven to witness what a rogue you are! Aye, but you're a gay fowl, and I'm o'er fond of you! The first requirement of the Prairie Falcon is open country; and the sec- ond a cranny where she may lay her young. These conditions are ideally met in a low range of hills which run north and south through eastern San Luis Obispo County, and form the back-bone of that "cattle country" made famous in story and song by deeds of vaquero and misdeeds of brigand. To the westward lie other rolling hills carpeted with bunch grass and dotted with oaks. To the castward stretches the arid interior plain. This cardinal ridge, by reason of tt, e Fig. 10. A NESTING HAUNT O1 THE PRAIRIE FALCON torrential character of the occasional rains of that country, is deeply scored by lateral canyons, and "breaks" in a thousand walls, walls which vary in appear- ance from the sloping adobe of the north to the rugged escarpments of sand- stone, conglomerate, and Pecten beds, which front the upper San Jtmn. Here are the castles, and there are the banquetting tables. For the presence of cattle means insects, and insects imply insect-eating birds, and Insectivores mean Rap- tores. If we use birds-of-prey in the economic instead of the structural sense. and so include Magpie, Raven, and Shrike, then this cattle country is ravaged by no less than 2 3 species of feathered bandits (and ghouls); and of these we actually saw nineteen in the course of a three weeks' reconnoissance last April. Of Falcones proper, after the ubiquitous Kestrel (why "Sparrowhawk"?), the Prairie Falcon is most numerous in fact and least evident to casual notice. It is his proper domain, but he rules it invisibly, from on high. His business with