CHESTNUT-BACKED CHICKADEE 385 



bird, seen for the first time. But, as we watch them we see that they 

 are still chickadees, with all their manners, activities, and cheery notes, 

 just old familiar friends in more richly colored garments, but just as 

 sociable, friendly, and intriguing; they win our affection at once. 



The chestnut-backed chickadee, of which there are three recognized 

 subspecies, occupies a long narrow range from the Sitka district of 

 southern Alaska southward along the humid coast belt to a little south 

 of Monterey Bay in California. Dr. Joseph Grinnell (1904), in his 

 interesting paper on the origin and distribution of this species, says 

 that its range is very "narrow, only within the confines of Oregon and 

 Washington exceeding one hundred miles and elsewhere usually much 

 less, save for one or two isolated interior colonies." The type race, 

 the subject of this sketch, occupies the greater part of this range, from 

 Alaska southward to Marin County, Calif., where it intergrades with 

 the Nicasio chickadee (P. r. neglectus). The interior colonies referred 

 to are in suitable coniferous forest environments in Idaho and western 

 Montana, west of the Continental Divide. As to the possible origin of 

 the chestnut-backed chickadee. Dr. Grinnell (1904) calls attention to a 

 certain degree of resemblance, as to appearance and habitat, between it 

 and the Hudsonian chickadee ; and he suggests that the two species may 

 have been derived from common ancestry, the dark, rich coloring of 

 riifescens having evolved under the influence of the humid coast belt in 

 which it lives ; though no intermediates between the two are now known 

 to exist, these may have been eliminated by the existence of insur- 

 mountable natural barriers and thus the two have become separate 

 species. It is an interesting theory! 



The favorite haunts of the chestnut-backed chickadees are the heavy, 

 dark forests of firs, spruces and pines, dense cedar, tamarack, and 

 hemlock woods, and, in California, the redwood forests. In the woods 

 about Seattle and Kirkland, Wash., where we found this and the Oregon 

 chickadees in 1911, there was then some of the primeval forest of lofty 

 firs still left, but much of it had been lumbered and overgrown with 

 second-growth firs of two or three species, with a considerable mixture 

 of hemlock and a very handsome species of cedar; there was also some 

 deciduous growth consisting of large alders and maples, with flowering 

 dogwood in full bloom and a wild currant with pink blossoms. 



Dr. Samuel S. Dickey writes to me that on the coast of southern 

 Alaska "it is a bird that rather inclines to remain much of the time in 

 the forests of gigantic evergreens, the Alaska cedars, Sitka spruces, 

 western hemlocks and the firs. But not infrequently it will rove into 

 glades and bogs, and it often comes down to the edges of the sea 

 beaches, and only a stone's throw from cabins and totem poles of the 

 native Indians." 



