A Second Record of the Oven-Bird on the Mohave Desert
A Second Record of the Oven-bird on the Mohave Desert.-Hunt (Condor, 22,1920:190) reported an Oven-bird (Seiztrus aurocapillus) on the Mohave,Desert of California near Lavic.
On May 13, 1937, I was camping in the broad smoke-tree wash leading down from the Granite Mountains toward Bristol Dry Lake near Amboy. It was about six o’clock in the morning and I was seated before my camp fire writing up my notes of the previous day. Glancing up I saw on the ground before me not more than ten feet away a small bird whose identity was unmistakable: it was none other than the Oven-bird. During the next half hour I had it continuously under observation. The bird was exceedingly unafraid and as it moved about peering under leaves of ground-hugging annuals for insect food, I slowly followed it. It kept close to the ground rising only occasionally to fly to some new feeding place in the broad openings between shrubs or beneath the shelter of smoketrees (Dalea s&.osa). The site where I saw this warbler is but thirty miles away from the place where Mr. Hunt observed the species in 1920.-EDMUND C. JAEGER, Riverside College, Riverside, California, June 1,1947.
