Volume XI Play-June 1909 Number' B THE WHITE-THROATED SWIFTS ON $LOVER MOUNTAIN By WILSON C. HANNA WITH ONE PHOTO BY THE AUTHOR HE last of December, 1907, found me with a strong desire to find and secure the nest and eggs of the White-throated Swift (Aero?aules melanolet?us). This may seem to be an early date to begin to make arrangements, but to tell the exact truth this was not the first time that I had had such a fanciful desire. It was during'one of the nice warm days in the above mentioned month that I became convinced that some of these most interesting birds had made their home on Slaver Mountain. Slaver Mountain, a land mark of the San Bernardino Valley, is an. isolated hill of solid limestone situated about a mile southwest of the busy little city of Colton. It rises to about 500 feet above the floor of the valley, this being about 1500 feet above sea level. Old Slaver has always been famous as a look-out point [or resi- dents a[ the valley and no tourist has seen the valley properly without the view from Slaver. During the past twenty years this old hill has been the seat of ever growing commercial activity, and with large cement works on two sides of the hill, marble works, lime kilns, quarries, etc., one would scarcely expect to find it the home of the White-throated Swift. The continual blasting in the many quarries and the many holes on the hill have made it so dangerous to visitors that few would care to risk the ascent even if they could obtain permission from the California Portland Cement Company to do so. One of the treacherous places has proved to be a boon to the swifts, and it is with the swifts in this old abandoned quarry on the highest part of the mountain that this article is to deal. The old quarry is noteworthy not only as being the home of the White-throated Swifts, but as the quarry from which the rock was obtained in the early nineties to manufacture the first Portland cement west of the Mississippi River, and the removal of rock from this quarry consumed the very highest point of the hill. When the cement company abandoned this quarry about 1896 [or more accessible workings a couple of hundred yards away, they left a narrow gulch about twenty to thirty feet wide, one hundred and twenty-five feet long, and with two almost perpendicular faces of limestone, as much as seventy-five feet high in some places
