“New birds, new flowers, new pleasures,” I murmur as my vision widens upon the, to me, new world of Arizona. A new delight indeed, notwithstanding the often impressed fact that the old footpath-ways of Ohio are, after many years, still but half discovered countries. But ’tis human, this desire for novelty, and I am not at all in advance of my fellow kindred in arriving at that stage of blessed content which we see expressed upon every side of us in the lives of the lesser (?) creatures who abide without unrest until compelled by the necessities of necessity to “move on.” But I echo Richard Jefferies: “a fresh flower, a fresh path-way, a fresh delight,” and am so far content; and, truly, coming from the east of living greens, ’tis a new kingdom of somber mountains and sandy desert at which I have arrived. To an imaginative person it is a land filled with the echoes of a distant past, even now but half heard and in my mind the golden glow of a day that is dead enfolds the silent hills, a silence of grandeur, not of nature which is here alive and keen to the fullest extent. With many other naturalists, I agree that if one desires to learn the secrets of the field and forest, one must go about singly and alone. There is something strange about it too, while one person alone is allowed to see many of the inner movements of wild life, when two or three are gathered together, they seem to intimidate the wood folk to an unlimited extent. But bird life in this far away territory, notwithstanding Dr. Charles Abbott’s experience to the contrary, seems to me to be much more companionable and less timid than in the more thickly populated east, and also, bird curiosity is more noticeable than in those states where generations of experience has obviated all desire for any close scrutiny or investigation of that queer biped without feathers. One has only to sit silent and quiet for a few moments to have his ornithological interest aroused by numerous visitors, who, with impatient “chips” and “twits” question his presence among them. While Gila county makes up her quota of song birds in quantity, she lacks something in decorative quality, at least so far as coloring of plumage is concerned. There is no question but what the very arid atmosphere of this section is not without its marked effect upon feather coloring, and on account of this dullness of plumage, I was at first unable to classify numbers of birds who were perfectly familiar to me in Ohio. Birds like the blue jay lose much of the metallic gorgeousness of their plumage and are under a veil as it were, showing a dull, bluish gray. The blackbirds also are decidedly rusty in appearance, hardly holding their own with the great glossy ravens (Corvus principalis) who have so adapted themselves to civilization as to have become almost a necessity as purveyors of edible refuse and debris which accumulates in such abundance about the abodes of mankind, who are supposedly the most hygienic and cleanly of all