Near Santa Cruz is a grove of large and beautiful redwoods, many of the trees being over three hundred feet high and from forty to sixty-five feet around the base of the trunk.  The Giant is the largest, and three other immense ones are named for Generals Grant, Sherman, and Fremont.  In 1846 General Fremont found this grove, and camped, on a rainy winter night, in the hollow trunk of the tree bearing his name.  Here is also seen a group of eleven very tall trees growing in a circle around an old stump.

In the Sierras, both in the sequoia groves and forests above the Big-Tree region, are very large sugar-pines, red firs, and yellow-pine trees, all of which make excellent lumber.  Great forests of these trees, with cedars almost as large as the redwoods, are in the northern counties also.  You may have seen sugar-pine cones which are over a foot long, the largest of all found, while redwood cones are the smallest.  Another great tree is the Douglas spruce, the king of spruce trees, growing in both Sierra Nevada and Coast ranges.

The California laurel, or bay tree, with its beautiful, shining green leaves, and the madrono, the slender, red-barked tree on the hillsides you must have noticed in your trips to the country, as well as our fine valley and mountain oaks.  Try to learn the kinds of trees and study their leaves, blossoms, and fruit, and you will find every one a friend well worth knowing.  Then you will wish to save them from fire and the lumberman’s axe, especially the rare and old sequoias.

OUR BIRDS

More than three hundred kinds of these dear feathered friends and visitors live in California.  Along the sea-shore, in the great valleys and the mountain-forests and meadows, even in the dry, hot desert, the birds, our shy and merry neighbors, are at home.  In many parts of the state they find sunshine and green trees the year round, and food always at hand.  Yet sparrows, robins, and woodpeckers will stay in the snowed-in groves of the Sierras all winter, contentedly chirping or singing in spite of the bitter cold.

If you know these wanderers of wood and field, these birds of sea and shore, and their interesting habits, you will wish to protect them from stone or gun, and their nests from the egg collector.  You will listen to the lark and linnet, and be glad that the happy songster trilling such sweet notes is free to fly where he wishes, and is not pining in a cage.  And you, little girl, will not encourage the destruction of these pretty creatures by wearing a sea-gull or part of some dead bird on your hat.