erver
saw a female in July at the timber-line, which is three thousand feet
above the normal range of the species. Why did not this birdlet remain
within the bounds set by the scientific guild? Suit for contempt of
court should be brought against it. Redstarts must have been very scarce
in the regions over which I rambled, else I certainly should have
noticed birds that are so fearless and so lavish of song.

One day my companion and I clambered up the steep side of a mesa some
distance below Golden--that is, the base of the mesa was below the
village, while its top towered far above it. A mesa was a structural
portion of Colorado topography that neither of the two ramblers had yet
explored, and we were anxious to know something about its resources from
a natural history point of view. It was hard climbing on account of the
steepness of the acclivity, its rocky character, and the thick network
of bushes and brambles in many places; but "excelsior" was our motto in
all our mountaineering, and we allowed no surmountable difficulties to
daunt us. What birds select such steep places for a habitat? Here lived
in happy domesticity the lyrical green-tailed towhee, the bird of the
liquid voice, the poet laureate of the steep, bushy mountain sides, just
as the water-ousel is the poet of the cascades far down in the canyons
and gulches; here also thrived the spurred towhees, one of which had
tucked a nest beneath a bush cradling three speckled eggs. This was the
second nest of this species I had found, albeit not the last. Here also
dwelt the rock wren, a little bird that was new to me and that I had not
found in the latitude of Colorado Springs either east or west of the
continental divide. A description of this anchorite of the rocks will be
given in a later chapter. I simply pause here to remark that he has a
sort of "monarch-of-all-I-survey" air as he sits on a tall sandstone
rock and blows the music from his Huon's horn on the messenger breezes.
His wild melodies, often sounding like a blast from a bugle, are in
perfect concord with the wild and rugged acclivities which he haunts,
from which he can command many a prospect that pleases, whether he
glances down into the valleys or up to the silver-capped mountain peaks.
One cannot help feeling--at least, after one has left his rock-strewn
dwelling-place--that a kind of glamour hangs about it and him.

The loud hurly-burly of the long-tailed chat reached us from a bushy
hollow