86 BIRDS OF THE ROCKIES 



winter resident, while in the middle West, Missouri, 

 Kansas, Nebraska, etc., are to be found the prairie 

 horned larks, which, as their name indicates, choose the 

 open prairie for their home. The desert horned larks 

 are tenants exclusively of the arid plains, mesas, and 

 mountain parks of the West. There is still another 

 variety, called the pallid horned lark, which spends the 

 winter in Colorado, then hies himself farther north in 

 summer to rear his brood. 



As I pursued my walk, one of these birds suddenly 

 assumed an alert attitude, then darted into the air, 

 mounting up, up, up, in a series of swift leaps, like 

 " an embodied joy whose race has just begun." Up he 

 soared until he could no longer be seen with the naked 

 eye, and even through my field-glass he was a mere 

 speck against the blue canopy, and yet, high as he had 

 gone, his ditty filtered down to me through the still, 

 rarefied atmosphere, like a sifting of fine sand. His 

 descent was a grand plunge, made with the swiftness 

 of an Indian's arrow, his head bent downward, his 

 wings partly folded, and his tail perked upward at 

 precisely the proper angle to make a rudder, all the 

 various organs so finely adjusted as to convert him into 

 a perfectly dirigible parachute. Swift as his descent 

 was, he alighted on the ground as lightly as a tuft of 

 down. It was the poetry of motion. One or two 

 writers have insisted that the horned lark's empyrean 



