There is no special preponderance of self-fertilized or wind-fertilized plants, but everywhere the --demand for and evidence of insect life. Now where there are seeds and insects there will be birds and small mammals and where these are, will come the slinking, sharp-toothed kind that prey on them. Go as far as you dare in the heart of a lonely land, you cannot go so far that life and death are not before you. --Painted lizards slip in and out of rock crevices, and pant on the white hot sands. Birds, hummingbirds even, nest in the cactus --scrub; woodpeckers befriend the demoniac yuccas; --out of the stark, treeless waste rings the music of the night-singing mockingbird. If it be summer and the sun well down, there will be a burrowing owl to call. Strange, --furry, ---tricksy things --dart across the open places, or sit motionless in the conning towers of the creosote. The poet may have "named all the birds without a gun," but not the --fairy-footed, ground-inhabiting, --furtive, small folk of the rainless regions. They are too many and too --swift; how many you would not believe without seeing the footprint tracings in the sand. They are nearly all night workers, finding the days too hot and --white. In mid-desert where there are no cattle, there are no birds of carrion, but if you --go far in that direction the --chances are that you will find yourself shadowed by their tilted wings. Nothing so large as a man can move --unspied upon in that country, and they know well how the land deals with strangers. There are hints to be had here of the way in which a land forces new habits on its dwellers. The quick increase of suns at the end of spring sometimes overtakes birds in their nesting and effects a reversal of the ordinary manner of incubation. It becomes necessary to keep eggs cool  rather than warm. One hot, --stifling spring in the Little Antelope I had occasion to pass and repass frequently the nest of a pair of meadowlarks, located unhappily in the shelter of a very slender weed. I never caught them sitting except near night, but at mid-day they stood, or drooped above it, half fainting with pitifully parted bills, between their treasure and the sun. Sometimes both of them together with wings spread and half lifted continued a spot of shade in a temperature that --constrained me at last in a fellow feeling to spare them a bit of canvas for permanent shelter. There was a fence in that country shutting in a cattle range, and along its fifteen miles of posts one could be sure of finding a bird or two in every strip of shadow; sometimes the sparrow and the hawk, with wings trailed and beaks parted, --drooping in the white --truce of noon.