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 52 THE CONDOR [VOL. V March, t896, I heard that the jays were nesting on the ranch of a friend about sixteen miles north of my place, so [ rode over there and on March 29th and 3oth found several nests and took four or five sets of eggs. These were carefully packed in an old cigar box and stowed away in one ot the saddle pockets, but un- fortunately as [ was taking a rest and a lunch on my way home, the horse shook himself and of course the saddle also, with the result that most of the eggs were broken. In t898 the professor arranged to visit this same ranch with me, and on April 4th we started in an old buckboard and had a fairly successful trip, getting some good specimens of the birds and several clutches of eggs. The ranch is situated at the head of one of the main branches of the Guadaloupe and takes in some of the divide between that river and the Llano. As in other parts of the county the limestone rocks are in evidence everywhere. Numerous little valleys run down toward the rivers, becoming deeper and steeper as they approach the larger creek, and often forming narrow canyons with high bluffs on both sides. Large trees are not numerous, but the whole face of the country is covered with clumps of shin oak and scrubby live oak. In these clumps we found the jays' nests, generally placed near the outside of a thicket, at from four to six feet from the ground, and often conspicuous from quite a distance, as the shrubs were only beginning to put out their leaves at that time. As a rule the birds were setting and one nest con- tained young nearly ready to leave it. The nests were composed of an outer bas- ket of twigs not very firmly put together, and lined rather neatly veith grass, hair, and small root fibres. They were rather more bulky than mockingbirds' nests and the inner nest was saucer shaped rather than cup shaped. Most of them were placed in the shin oaks, but some few were in live oaks, and I have since found sever- al in cedar bushes. The birds are not so noisy as the common blue jay and are particu- larly silent when near their nests. They have a habit of hopping upwards through a thicket from twig to twig until they arrive at the top of it, when they fly off with four or five harsh squeaks to the next clump of brush, into which they dive headlong. It was a very warm day with the thermometer in the shade of the gallery at the ranch standing well up in the nineties, and tramping about throngh the thickets and picking our way over the rocks was by no means light work, but the walk was so interesting that we did not have time to think of getting tired. Of course we found much to interest us besides the jays. An untidy platform of sticks in a small Spanish oak tree, proved on investigation to be a road-runner's nest, contain- ing six eggs, which from their unusually clear appearance, were probably all of them fresh. One frequently finds eggs in different stages of incubation in a road- runner's nest and sometimes eggs and young birds or young birds of different sizes. Several times we disturbed deer. They were in their fresh summer suits of red, having already discarded their gray winter overcoats. As is so often the case when one is not hunting them, they would stop to take a second look at us, offer- ing pretty broadside shots at fifty or sixty paces. In one extra dense thicket at the head of a rough little hollow we found a pair of long-eared owls (,4sio wilsen- ianus) the first we had ever seen in the county; and on a rocky ridge just beyond were a couple of burrowing owls. They flew a few yards and then settled on some rocks, nodding their heads at us in their usual ludicrous fashion. These owls do not breed in this county, but we see them every year in the spring and autumn. There are no prairie dog towns on this side of the Llano river, but plenty of them just across it and I have been told that the owls breed over there. Many snall flocks of migrating birds were seen, some of them just arriving for the summer and others getting ready to leave us. Conspicuous among the