THE. CO. pB.R Volume XV July-August, 1919 Number A NEST OF THE DUSKY HORNED LARK By CLARENCE HAMILTON KENNEDY WITH ONE DRAWING BY THE AUTHOR HILE walking through the sage brush on March 26, I almost stepped on the nest of a pair of Dusky Horned Larks (Otocoris alpestris mer- rilli). The Dusky Lark is the most COnlmon bird in the brush areas of the Lower Yakima Valley, but nevertheless this is only the second nest I have found in four seasons. Because of the very quiet and furtive habits of the birds, they never betray the location of nests, which are found only by stumbling onto them. This one was a cup-shaped depression, dug in the sand at the base of a sage b(?sh, thickly lined with soft grass, leaves and stems, and with shreds of sage brush bark. In the bottom was a thick layer of the soft downy pappus of some composite. The nest contained three young, which were not more than two days old, for they were very small and their eyes were not yet open, while they were scantily covered with creamy down. I lingered over the nest several minutes, but the bird which I supposed was a parent remained on a fence post fifty yards away, and did not show any great distress. One young opened his bill but none made any sound. I visited the nest again four days later, on March 30. As on the first visit, no parent bird was discovered near the nest, but after I had spent several minutes trying to adjust a camera for a picture, one of them circled about at a distance of thirty feet uttering sharp cries, and finally flew to a fence fifty yards away, where it perched during the remainder of my stay. The three young on this day had increased wonderfully in size. They were so large that they were crowding out of the nest. The illustration shows them as they appeared at this time. Their eyes were wide open and they werb fully feathered, with only a vestige of dow. n about the neck. The individual birds occupied the same positions in the nest that they had on my previous visit. With the exception of the white underneath the
