8o THE HEPBURN LEUCOSTICTE. 



finclies moving alx>nt demurely upon the face of a clioppy snowdrift, pecking 

 at the surface here and there, lie begins to harbor an uncanny suspicion that 

 the birds do' eat snow. Closer examination, however, shows that the surface 

 of all snow-banks, not freshly covered, is sprinkled with insects, — midges, 

 beetles, wasps, and the like — insects which the spring gales have swept up 

 to uncongenial heights and dropped, benumbetl or dead with cold. These 

 battered waifs the Leucostictes gather with untiring patience, and they are 

 thus able to subsist as nO' other species can, up to the very summits. 



The eggs of the Hepburn Leucosticte have not to^ our knowledge yet 

 been taken. Mr. D. E. Brown, then of Glacier, found these birds scooping 

 hollows under grass tussocks on the middle slopes of Baker, above timber 

 line, on the 7th of June, 1905. On the 20th of July, 1900, Professor Lynds 

 Jones and myself found a thick-walled grass nest settled upon bare rock 

 without protection, on the south slope of the aiguille of Wright's Peak, at 

 an elevation of some 9,000 feet, and within a hundred yards of the summit ; 

 this could hardly have belonged to any other species. 



In July, 1907, knowing that it was too* late for eggs, I yet spent several 

 days searching the precipitous wall which separates the upper Horseshoe 

 Basin from the glacier which heads Thunder Creek. Adult birds tO' the 

 number of a dozen gleaned scraps from the dump of the Cascade Mine house ; 

 but, altho' each made off in business-like fashion when "loaded," the stretch 

 of the wall was too- vast and its recesses too' mazy to permit of e.xact work 

 in tracing. I therefore e.xamined carefully but with difficulty several of the 

 weathered fissures, or couloirs, which ran perpendicularly up the face of the 

 clifif. Here, under cover of rocks which had lodged in the throat of the 

 fissure, or which had weathered out unevenly, old nests were found, simple 

 affairs of coiled grasses, and too dilapidated for exact measurement. From 

 one <_^f these sites a pebble snapped from the finger must have fallen three 

 hundred feet before striking the glacier below. 



Now and then a passing bird, suspicious of my intent, stopped on some 

 projecting point o-f rock, to utter the sole note which does duty for every 

 mood, churkk or scJithub. a sound comparable only to the concussion of a 

 small taut rope on a flag-pole. Finally, near the top of the Sahale Glacier, 

 I got a line at two hundred yards on an occupied fissure, and traced both 

 parent Leucostictes into its distant recesses. Climbing cautiously up a sharp 

 slope of ice, my footsteps were guided by the almost incessant clamor of young 

 birds. Arrived at the upper lip of the glacier, however, I found that it stood 

 away from the rock-wall some fifteen feet, and that a chasm some forty feet 

 in depth yawned beneath. Into this forbidding bcrgschriind . one of the 

 fledgling Leucostictes had tumbled. He was not more than two-thirds grown 

 (Julv 1 8th) and down feathers still fluttered fmm his cheeks, but he was a 

 |)lucky little fellow, and had managed to scramble up off the ice onto a piece 



