THE. CO.IB.R Volume IX January-February 1007 Number 1 PHOTOGRAPHING MAGPIES BY EDWARD R. WARREN 'Ig many parts of the West the conglomeration of sticks and twigs, which a magpie gathers for a nest, is a conspicuous object in the trees and bushes along the streams and elsewhere. Rude and shapeless as they look when viewed from the outside, they are really comfo?:table homes; for inside the mass of sticks is built a nest cavity of mud, lined with fine rootlets, and overhead is a roof of twigs, with the entrance usually on the side, tho one occasionally runs across a nest with little or no roof. The cavity is often eight to ten inches deep. The nest shown in the picture is not the one in which the young birds lived; that was in a clump of willows so thick that the nest would not photograph well. These nests are used for several seasons: The one in which my family lived was occupied for at least three summers, and in the winter of 1900-01 was partly destroyed by storms and the weight of the snow; in the spring of 1901 a new nest was built in an adjoining clump. The nests of Pica pica hudso?tica are anywhere from ten to forty feet above the ground; but I think between ten and twenty feet will cover three-fourths of the cases. The one in the cut showing eight eggs was very exceptional, not much over three feet from the ground to the front door: just a nice height for photo- graphic purposes. I promised myself a nice series of pictures of the young birds from that nest; but when I thought the time had come for them to be sitting up and taking notice, and went there with the camera, I found someone else had also taken notice and the nest was empty. The family of young birds whose pictures I did take were in a nest near Crested Butte, Colorado, and, as luck would have it, I found them the very day they hatched, so that their ages were known exactly. That was on the 27th day of May, 1900. It was my first season at photographing young birds and I tried some impossibilities in the way of attempts at pictures in the nest. The picture taken at thirteen days old, tho poor, shows their growth from the naked natal con- dition during that time. At 18 days they had advanced still more, and another three days showed an astonishing progress; for on the twenty-first day I had nay
