1566 U.S. NATIONAL MUSEUM BULLETIN 23 7 part 3 



actual text of Lewis' account of the discovery was not published until 

 Thwaites brought out the original Lewis and Clark "Journals," 

 uncut and intact, in 1904-05. By that time Captain McCown's 

 discovery of the longspur was firmly established in the literature. 

 With no specimen of McCown's from the expedition at hand, orni- 

 thologists since then seem indisposed to reopen the question whether 

 the "small bird" Lewis saw on its breeding grounds really was, as 

 Coues stoutly maintained, Centrophanes (Rhynchophanes) maccowni. 



If his identification of the species lacks detail, Lewis' description 

 of its habitat is certainly that of McCown's longspur. For McCown's 

 is a bird of the land where mirages on miles of sage and salt flats 

 deceive the eye with the illusion of gleaming tree-bordered lakes; 

 where, as Lewis observed, "the whole country appears to be one 

 continued plain to the foot of the mountains or as far as the eye can 

 reach; the soil appears dark rich and fertile yet the grass * * * is 

 short just sufficient to conceal the ground. Great abundance of 

 prickly pears which are extremely troublesome; as the thorns very 

 readily pierce the foot through the Mockerson; they are so numerous 

 that it requires one half of the traveler's attention to avoid them;" 

 a land where the temperature, as unpredictable as a cowboy's flapjacks, 

 rises breathlessly high in summer and drops to icy lows in winter. In 

 Custer County, Montana, in the late 1880s, Ewen S. Cameron (1907) 

 watched McCown's longspurs in the heat waves of a temperature 

 standing at 114 degrees. In July 1911 near Choteau, Teton County, 

 in the same state, Aretas A. Saunders (1912), caught in one of those 

 thunderstorms which suddenly and commonly lash the plains, fled to 

 cover under a sheep herder's shed to escape the rain which quickly 

 changed to hail. Soon "a small flock" of McCown's longspurs 

 joined him, "feeding on the ground under the shed as though they 

 were out in the open in the best of weather." 



I remember the flock of McCown's I saw in 1958 in a late April 

 squall. According to my field notes: 



Mr. and Mrs. Herman Chapman, Dr. N. R. Whitney, Jr., and I drove near 

 Casper, Wyoming. With the unexpectedness characteristic of prairie weather, a 

 spring storm hurled wind and snow upon us; the road ahead vanished. We no 

 more than crawled along a road where side-banks, car high, were topped with sage. 



Suddenly we saw birds struggling into view over and into the road. Some 

 came down no more than a car's length away. Chapman stopped altogether. 

 We saw they were McCown's Longspurs, the black caps and dark smudgy 

 crescents on the breast marking the gray fronts of the males. Farther away 

 were others, their bodies so light in color that frequently they were invisible, lost 

 in the folds of snow. Several dozen swooped out of a gust. Through snow on 

 the windshield and snow driven in windy sheets we watched. Perhaps as many 

 as two hundred birds drifted into the road and up the side of the opposite bank. 



The wind ripped at the sage above them, but here in the lee of the bank, in a 

 sort of microclimate less severe than the white fury above, they fed, apparently 



