1561 Thrashers continued to sing off to the north east. At 3:45 Julio gave Rhody a mouse, placing it in his old house to which he had just retired after apparently spending all the preceding hours on the ground in the neighborhood of the tree. A half hour earlier he would not take the mouse (while on the ground) but after he had retired (according to Julio) and he saw the mouse about to crawl under him "he got mad" and ate it! Neo was not seen all day, and the supposition is that he has gone to the north side of the spur, seeking a lee, and there remain- ed. 12 o'clock midnight. I have just returned from Stanford Universi- ty after showing moving picture films of birds at the Stanford chap- ter of the C.O.C. and find the temperature still 62°! Still rain- ing. This was a tropical storm. Dec. llth. Not raining, mild and cloudy. Thrashers singing to the north- east all the morning. Papers filled with stories of unprecedented rains, floods, washouts on all railroads; Clear Lake, twenty odd miles long, rising 6 inches in 24 hours, etc. This condition due to a vast barometric depression with center of the low out in the Pacif- ic ocean, relatively high temperatures prevailing, with maxima as follows: San Francisco 69, Salinas 71, Fresno 76, Los Angeles 62, San Diego 68. 12 M. At 11 A.M. I went out to investigate the thrasher that was singing off to the north-east. I found there were two in a cork elm about 200 yards from this room. They were both singing confused sorts of songs and hopping about in the leafless tree, behaving much as thrashers do in the "convention season". I could not tell whether relations between them were pleasant or otherwise. Soon they dropped down into the thicket of Baccharis and I followed. The confused medley of song continued. I was able to keep about 10 to 15 feet from them. Suddenly the songs ceased and they began to fight on the ground silently and viciously. Frequently one knocked the other over onto his back with feet in the air. The one on his back would try to seize the other with his feet, often succeeding, when they would fight breast to breast, pecking at each others mouths. It soon became evident that their manner of fighting consisted in each attempting to grasp the feet or legs of the other, hold him breast to breast and peck. This was all new to me. Finally I lost tack of them, but waited near the elm. One of them flew up into it and began to sing softly and was heard to repeat many times the phrase which can only be written vic-to-ree', with rising tone on the ree. This was so pat an expression of what may have been the truth as to the outcome of the encounter, that I listened intently at a distance of about twenty feet and did my best regard the matter en- tirely from an unemotional and detached view-point and tried to fit some other syllables to the phrase, but it could not be done. The phrase was vic-to-ree and nothing else as far as the English language (which I did not know thrashers spoke!) can represent it. Neither of these birds carried any identification marks, so they were neither Okii nor Chiisai. I sat on the bank and began to toss a worm now and then on the ground in front of me. The bird in the tree saw the very first one. Finally it came down and began to pick them up. Soon it was within 8 feet of me; then 6; then about 3. It ate all my worms. I came back and looked up Neo at his old haunt, but he was not there. I suspect that this bird probably was Neo. I am inclined to view this whole procedure as defense of