led around and around in the upper air so long that I
grew dizzy watching him, and my eyes became blinded by the sun and the
glittering sky. How long he kept up his aerial evolutions, singing all
the while, I am unprepared to announce, for I was too much engrossed in
watching him to consult my timepiece; but the performance lasted so long
that I was finally obliged to throw myself on my back on the ground to
relieve the strain upon me, so that I might continue to follow his
movements. I venture the conjecture that the show lasted from fifteen to
twenty minutes; at least, it seemed that long to me in my tense state of
body and mind. Finally he shot down like an arrow, making my head fairly
whirl, and landed lightly on the ground, where he skipped about and
resumed his roundelay as if he had not performed an extraordinary feat.
This was certainly skylarking in a most literal sense. With the
exception of a similar exhibition by Townsend's solitaire--to be
described in the closing chapter--up in the neighborhood of Gray's Peak,
it was the most wonderful avian aeronautic exploit, accompanied with
song, of which I have ever been witness. It is odd, too, that a bird
which is so much of a groundling--I use the term in a good sense, of
course--should also be so expert a sky-scraper. I had listened to the
sky song of the desert horned lark out on the plain, but there he did
not hover long in the air.

The killdeer plovers are as noisy in the park as they are in an eastern
pasture-field, and almost as plentiful. In the evening near the village
a pair of western robins and a thieving magpie had a hard tussle along
the fence of the road. The freebooter was carrying something in his beak
which looked sadly like a callow nestling. He tried to hide in the
fence-corners, to give himself a chance to eat his morsel, but they were
hot on his trail, and at length he flew off toward the distant ridge.
Where did the robins build their nests? I saw no trees in the
neighborhood, but no doubt they built their adobe huts on a fence-rail
or in a nook about an old building. Not a Say's phoebe had we thus far
seen on this jaunt to the mountains, but here was a family near the
village, and, sure enough, they were whistling their likely tunes, the
first time I had ever heard them. While I had met with these birds at
Glenwood and in the valley below Leadville, they had not vouchsafed a
song. What is the tune they whistle? Why, to be sure, it is, "Phe-be