Strange birds hopped among the bushes; the chaparral cock--a big, handsome ground-cuckoo of remarkable habits, much given to preying on small snakes and lizards--ran over the ground with extraordinary rapidity.

Beautiful swallow-tailed king-birds with rosy plumage perched on the tops of the small trees, and soared and flitted in graceful curves above them.

Blackbirds of many kinds scuttled in flocks about the corrals and outbuildings around the ranches.
Mocking-birds abounded, and were very noisy, singing almost all the daytime, but with their usual irritating inequality of performance, wonderfully musical and powerful snatches of song being interspersed with imitations of other bird notes and disagreeable squalling.
Throughout the trip I did not hear one of them utter the beautiful love song in which they sometimes indulge at night.
The country was all under wire fence, unlike the northern regions, the pastures however being sometimes many miles across.

When we reached the Frio ranch a herd of a thousand cattle had just been gathered, and two or three hundred beeves and young stock were being cut out to be driven northward over the trail.

The cattle were worked in pens much more than in the North, and on all the ranches there were chutes with steering gates, by means of which individuals of a herd could be dexterously shifted into various corrals.