EASTERN WHITE-CROWNED SPARROW 1283 



July 3, 1958, while crossing a very wet sedge bog near Lake Matamace 

 north of Schefferville, I watched a white-crown, which I took to be 

 a male, catch insects by running in water up to its "knees," throwing 

 up its tail, raising its white crest high, and "flashing" its wings much 

 as a mockingbird does to flush out the insect life from the bog mat. 



On July 10, 1944, at Goose Bay, Labrador, I flushed a pair of anxious 

 adults and after 10 minutes of hunting finally drove out a close- 

 sitting fledgling which a companion and I captured with difficulty. 

 It was interesting that three adults drove at us frantically as we 

 chased the young bird. They decoyed boldly with the "broken- 

 wing" feint, and drew me 40 feet from the young one, returning to me 

 each time I hesitated in following. 



In 1958 at an elevation of 2,600 feet on Irony Mountain in central 

 Quebec-Labrador, Henri Ouellet of the Canadian National Museum 

 watched a white-crown feed a still-downy willow ptarmigan. E. P. 

 Wheeler II, who has shared notes made during many years of patient 

 field work in Labrador, noticed that white-crowns sometimes scratch 

 for food very vigorously, using both feet at once as the fox sparrow 

 does. This trait, and the tendency of white-crowns to take easily to 

 man's newly created habitats in the northern wilderness, as song 

 sparrows and their western congeners do farther south, raises interest- 

 ing questions about the relationship of all these species. Raymond A. 

 Paynter, Jr. (1964), in the course of a review of some North American 

 Emberizinae, reaffirms the view that the basic differences between 

 the song sparrows, the fox sparrows, and the crowned and white- 

 throated sparrow groups are not clear-cut, and therefore urged that 

 the genera Melospiza, Passerella, and Zonotrichia be merged. The 

 existence of hybrids among the white-crowns (Miller, 1940), between 

 the white-crown and the white-throat (Abbott, 1958), and between 

 the white-crown and the song sparrow and the white-throat and the 

 junco (Dickerman, 1961) lends impressive weight to the Paynter 

 proposal. 



Voice. — Often as I sat in the dusk in my tent or some miner's shack 

 in the iron ore belt of interior Labrador in 1957, the song of the 

 white-crown reminded me of that of a diminutive eastern meadowlark. 

 "Especially is this so in chorus," I wrote, "and the first two notes are 

 often like the black-capped chickadee's sweet-ee call." I syllabified 

 one common version as, "teu-dee * * * et tu aklavik," a phrase which 

 will mean more if pronounced in French. Everyone recognizes this 

 song as like an imperfect white-throated sparrow song. To Ludlow 

 Griscom it had the quality of a black- throated green warbler song, 

 while Francis H. Allen wrote Mr. Bent that to him the song was 

 "doleful rather than plaintive — the sweet expression of a state of 

 utter boredom, as if the bird were saying, 'Oh, well, what's the use?' " 



