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 110 THE CONDOR Vol. XX gan, at other times relying solely.on protective coloration; and on the face of a cliff between sky and water, as in the Cliff Swallow. But the White-throated Swift hgs outschemed and outfigured them all in the selection of its nest site and construction of a comfortable nest,--out of reach of floods, storms, sliding rocks, reptiles, predatory mammals and birds, and the wisest ones beyond the depredations of the most enthusiastic oological crank unless the life of the latter is insured for twice its value ! This bird has elinfinated practically every danger to its home except the vermin, and why it has not figured this out also is difficult for me to understand. Denver, Colorado, February 11, 1918. A RETURN TO THE DAKOTA LAKE REGION By FLORENCE MERRIAM BAILEY (Continued from. page 70) II. BIRDS OF THE UNBROKEN PRAIRIE T ltE LAND bordering the Sweetwaters was nearly all in grain, but three miles to the northeast, by the section lines, there was still a strip of ori- ginal, unbroken prairie, as I found to my satisfaction when invited to a iamily dinner by the grandparents of our little school boy. As the farm-house was torn up by repairs at the moment, a "cook car" left in the yard by a threshing outfit, a car twenty feet long by ten wide stilted up on four wheels, was used as an emergency dining-room, greatly to my delectation, as it was my first opportunity to examine one. We climbed .up the high front steps--taken in .before starting on the road that the four horses might be driven from the front door--and as we sat on benches drawn up to the long table fitted to serve twenty or thirty men and I looked with curiosity at the stove at the end of the car and the protected trays for dishes against the walls, the old settlers told in- teresting tales of the early days on the prairie. When they had come' as pioneers in 1884, prairie fires were a real danger, it was an easy matter to get lost in the big sloughs with grass standing seven r eight feet high, and buffalo bones strewed the ground. Ox cart trains of Sioux, with squaws and papooses, used to come from Fort Totten to pick up the bones to ship out for fertilizer, and the primitive ungreased wooden carts with wheels five feet high--coming usually in trains of from seven to eleven but once in a train of twenty-eight cars--as the pioneer expressed it, "squawked so" they could be heard crossing the Belgrade Bridge four miles away. For four or five years after the first settlers came, the Indians kept on "picking bones", which gives a slight idea of the hordes of buffalo that once roamed that part of the prairie. In the narrow strip of unbroken prairie that is left, a few Prairie Chickens were still to be found. When the hunting season opened, the sound of shots made the Grandfather exclaim regretfully, "He's got them!" But the only ones seen by me in the neighborhood were on the road between the two farmhouses