for our arrival somewhere. So when the end of the point had at last been reached and the tedious search began through the large monolithic rocks and the manzanita for some traces of habitation, his patience exploded. "Don't you know this rock? Don't you know this tree? Don't you know this point? Don't you know where the hotel is? Don't you know anything?" And the botanist through sheer brain fag dreamily answered, "What hotel?" Indeed, so many were the points on the end of State Line Point that by the time all had been searched over the last remnant of the night was passing. The hotel grounds were finally found by following a fallen wire, but the Californian was fain to plunge into the barn for fear that the hotel might not be just beyond.

Round the wide hotel porch we tramped, when the botanist came to himself and readily discovered the door. Our shouts through the empty building were answered only by the roar of the surf. Everything below had been dismantled. Every stove had been deprived of a section of its pipe. Only Only a box of apples and some pine nuts offered a welcome. Above, the beds were intact, and into these we crept with sodden garments cast aside, content to solve the problem of putting them on again when we should awake. In this mood we fell asleep, the Californian and the botanist each with an apple at his lips.

In the waking moments following refreshing sleep we formed many plans of escape from our isolation before apprehension should be felt for our safety.

But our troubles were over. In our second search of the premises our good angel, William Williston, the keeper, was found in his quarters down the avenue, and clad in nondescript summer garments, the party was bounteously fed and entertained until it broke up the following day. The intervening time was spent on foot and in boat traversing the shores of Agate and Crystal bays, enjoying the roll of the waves. In the evening we sailed back along the scene of the previous night's wanderings to obtain the abandoned outfit. Beautiful was the distant sweep of moonlit mountains and the shadows

of the overhanging shore. The only evidence of winter was the distant snow and the film of ice formed by the spray upon the boat. Otherwise it might have been a summer evening, except that the gulls had left their rookery on the western shore of the point.

Next morning the flying Meteor, snow laden, bore the Californian away on a voyage round the lake. He planned to catch a possible train from Tahoe City. The botanist and the enthusiast tramped over Mt. Pluto to Truckee. In the evening the Californian met these two again, just as the train came to speed them to their homes. He had walked from the lake to Truckee, and that in a pair of thin leather shoes. Gritty son of vigorous Russian sires, he had thrived on his hardships and grown more enthusiastic with the days.

"All was good," called he as the train drew out, "even coming down that cañon." And the botanist added, "We paid cheaply for the sights we saw."

i

THE MOUNTAIN BLUEBIRD AND THE WOOD PEWEE.

BY WILLIAM FREDERIC Badè.

With photographs by the author.

Fifty-six years ago the French historian, Jules Michelet,* published a work entitled "The Bird," which soon passed through nine or ten editions in the French language. This was followed afterwards by three other works of a similar character, entitled respectively, "The Insect," "The Ocean," and "The Mountain." They all belong to an interesting type of writing about nature, in vogue at that time, which is best described as a sentimental illustration of natural history.

One now reads with amusement the author's claim to be scientific in his observations, especially when he places Alphonse Toussenel's Le Monde des Oiseaux, Ornithologie Passionelle (published 1852) on a level with the works of Wilson and Audubon. Giacomelli's illustrations in "The Bird" and Percival Skelton's in "The Mountain" give away his case at a glance. Such a thing as photographic accuracy in reproducing a mountain or a bird. never occurred to either of them. The illustrations of birds, unrecognizable as to genus or species, belong mostly to certain forms that had become stereotyped in ornamental marginal designs. They flutter about in vignettes and do the most unbelievable things.

In one of the first text illustrations a bird sits on the edge of a table, trying to read a page of the author's manuscript. On the last page of the book four of them sit in various attitudes on his pencil, presumably singing

*1798-1874. Published L'Oiseau, 1856; L'Insecte, 1857; La Mer, 1861; La Montagne, 1868. The first and last are the best. Translated into English by W. H. Davenport Adams.

"finis." In "The Mountain" one looks with equal bewilderment at etchings of what purport to be well-known mountains in the Alps. They are as unreal as Gustave Doré's landscapes of the Dantean inferno. The author's descriptions of mountain scenery are interesting in themselves, but they betray unmistakably the interest and knowledge of a man who has never conquered lofty summits as a climber.

Photography has in these days become a valuable aid both to the alpinist and the ornithologist. Besides, the type of scientific interest which students of nature have cultivated since the days of Darwin calls for the kind of accuracy which photography supplies. It fails at only one point; it does not reproduce colors. At all events, the application of color-photography to birds in the wild state cannot be seriously considered at present. This seems especially unfortunate in the case of the Mountain Bluebird (Sialia arctica, Swainson*; S. currucoides of Bechstein), whose exquisite coloring makes it rank easily as the bluest and most beautiful of the gentle family of bluebirds.

Campers in the Boreal zone of the Sierra Nevada soon become acquainted with the Mountain Bluebird. Along the edges of alpine meadows and in open stands of tamarack pine, mostly at altitudes ranging from 7,000 feet upward, this bluebird rears its brood. Ridgway's description of the plumage of the male as "plain rich turquoise, cerulean or sevres blue above" holds true of most of the specimens I saw in the alpine lake region north of the

*The English naturalist, William Swainson (born 1789) was the first to describe the Mountain Bluebird from one specimen obtained in 1825 at Fort Franklin, Mackenzie. His description will be found in the Fauna Boreali-Americana (1829-37), Vol. II, 1831, Plate 39. In publishing this work he was associated with Sir John Richardson. The colored plate of the bird, being made from a dead specimen, is certainly wrong in the drawing of the head. Some give to the German naturalist and forester, J. M. Bechstein (1757-1822) the credit of having named and described the Mountain Bluebird for the first time, giving it the species name currucoides.

Tuolumne. The abdomen and shorter under tail-coverts of both male and female are white in summer. This fact, together with the intenser blue coloring, the absence of rufous and brown on the breast, and the somewhat larger size, serves to distinguish the Mountain Bluebird from the Western Bluebird (Sialia mexicana occidentalis), into whose range the habitat of the former sometimes extends. The sight of one of these bluebirds, in full summer plumage, hovering a few feet above the flowery carpet of a meadow, while hunting for grasshoppers, makes a memorable occasion.

On the 28th of July, 1911, the Sierra Club made a side trip from Kerrick Cañon to Tilden Lake. On the way thither I observed that Mountain Bluebirds were numerous along the trail. The following day I tried to locate nests in the neighborhood of our camp at the lower end of Tilden Lake. In a short time I found the homes of three pairs of these gentle mountaineers. All of them had appropriated abandoned woodpecker holes, excavated in dead or dying tamarack pines (P. murrayana). The altitude was 9,000 feet.

One of these nesting sites was in a large dead pine at the lower end of the lake. The opening was a considerable distance from the ground. The young must have been fairly large, for they chirped loudly during the feeding operations. I photographed the tree and its background, as shown in the accompanying cut. It affords a glimpse of what is in many ways a characteristic summer environment of the Mountain Bluebird in the Sierra Nevada: an open forest consisting almost entirely of Murray pines; an overflowed meadow in which the Bluebirds were foraging together with Clarke Nutcrackers (Nucifraga columbiana); patches of snow lingering in hollows and on the ridges.

The second nest was about thirty feet above the ground in a dead pine overhanging the stream that carries off the surplus waters of Tilden Lake. The third was hardly more than fifteen feet from the ground. The birds had