1250 U.S. NATIONAL MUSEUM BULLETIN 23 7 part a 



Nebraska. He collected specimens that he described in his account 

 of the trip as Fringilla comata. 



Each of these men delayed publishing his discoveries, Nuttall for 

 6 years, Maximilian for 7 years. Meanwhile John James Audubon 

 completed the Elephant Folio of his epochal "Birds of America" 

 without this interesting species. Traveling up the Missouri by 

 steamship in 1843, Audubon and his companion, Edward Harris, saw 

 the bird for the first time near Fort Leavenworth, Kans. Harris 

 collected specimens and Audubon, unaware that it had already been 

 discovered and named twice, described it in the octavo edition of his 

 "Birds of America" (1843) as Fringilla harrisii in honor of his 

 "excellent and constant friend." While the priority of Nuttall's 

 specific name querula is clearly established, his singularly appropriate 

 "mourning finch" was superceded through usage by Audubon's 

 vernacular name. 



Little was learned during the next 40 years of the distribution or 

 the life history of these elusive birds. Believed originally to nest in 

 the type area, it was soon realized that the birds found there were 

 migrants. The careful work of Wells W. Cooke (1884) established 

 the eastern limit of their range in the United States and its center 

 roughly paralleling the 96th meridian, but its western and southern 

 boundaries remained vague. The wealth of faunal and local studies 

 of the ensuing three-quarters of a century have defined the normal 

 winter range more precisely and showed stragglers dispersing widely 

 into almost every state of the Union. 



The summer home of the Harris' sparrow remained mere conjecture 

 until Edward A. Preble (1902) found it breeding at Churchill. Preble 

 (1908b) also found it in 1903 along the eastern shore of Great Bear 

 Lake "in a habitat precisely similar to its chosen nesting ground on 

 Hudson Bay. All indications therefore point to the conclusion that 

 its principal breeding grounds are in the strip of stunted timber 

 extending for 800 miles between Hudson Bay and Great Bear Lake, 

 along the northern border of the transcontinental forest." 



Ernest Thompson Seton (1908) verified Preble's conclusions when 

 he found the species common from Great Slave Lake northward to 

 the edge of the Barren Grounds, and discovered a nest with young 

 almost ready to leave on August 5th. Other explorers in the North 

 have added testimony, but without extending the birds' known 

 breeding range. 



Spring. — During spring migration Harris' sparrows spread out over 

 a wide area that includes most of the central United States. The 

 species then occurs regularly, though sparing^, from northern Illinois 

 and southern Wisconsin to eastern Colorado, Montana, and eastern 

 Alberta east of the Continental Divide. William Youngworth 



