Page:Condor18(5).djvu/10

 184 THt CONDOR Vol. XVIII and hanging tails marked them when too far away to see their chestnut backs or yellow chest patches. Their familiar 'song with its mouthed furry burr suggested the wheat fields of Illinois, for which some of them may have been bound. When not in exclusive rows of their own kind, the Dickcissels were often sitting alongside the large Mourning Doves, making the groups suggest old and young. A droll picture was seen one day, May 9, on our return trip, four Hummingbirds sitting on a fence, mere darning needles against the big prairie. On the fence posts or low bushes from our first day out we occasionally saw one of the large Hawks, swainson.i and sennetti, among the rare pleasures of our journey. Swainsoni was a familiar westerner but the southern sennetti was new to me. 'When opportunity afforded I noted eagerly its immaculate breast, white rump, and white tail with black subterminal band; but the im- pression of the bird is what is recalled to-day when a level. prairie comes to mind. At a distance one sees a large statue of a Hawk on the prairie floor; on nearer approach, a Iing of Hawks looking up with calm enquiring gaze, both gaze and pose bespeaking the silent power of the race. The white of the Hawk, by Mr. Thayer's view of protective coloration, has been worked out to the undoing of its prey, the small mammals that look up at it against the light of the sky into which its whiteness enables it to fade; while on the other hand the small mammals have become colored like the prairie to protect them from furred and leathered hunters that look earthward. Some Jack rabbits that we saw on our first day's drive trusted to their protective coloration as if they knew what Nature had done for them. While one ran off fleetly, its long black-marked ears held high, several crouched motionless, and one fairly skulked along, its ears flat on its back concealing the conspicuous black nape, as it ran with body close to the ground. One of the crouching ones trusted to its disguise, but with anxiety in its big eyes, while we drove near enough to have touched it with a whip. In another place a Jack was jumped up from the horses' feet and apparently half asleep broke all the rules of protective conduct, stopping only a few yards from us and sit- ting down on its haunches with ears up full length and black neck conspicuous, a rare exception to our common experiences. Jack rabbits were the only animals seen on the open prairie but on the clay banks of Petranilla Creek when we made camp, tracks of coon, wild cat, and coyote, besides the excitingly strange tracks of armadillo-curious round, stumpy nail prints--suggested many stories of north and south. Big armadillo burrows were also found on our trip, slanting under cactus roots, and under tufts of marsh grass. How ardently I wished for a sight of the ancient ar- mored beasts ! The rich band of.vegetation bordering the creek demonstrated what water will do on the prairie. The flora showed the same northern and southern ad- mixtures that made the fauna especially interesting..Elms and ashes stood side by side with hackberry, moss-hung live oaks, blooming cactus, palmettos that were all leaves, and the curious all-thorns that instead of leaves have green bark covering branches and thorns. Our camp floor encircled by these interesting trees and bushes was carpeted by pink primroses that, at nine in the morning, were still facing west where they had turned to follow the sun the night before. Both migrant and resident birds enlivened the camp with their bright col-